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A Commemoration and a Historical Mediation
Richard White
| One hundred years have now passed since the founding of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, which has become the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Anniversaries are, as Margot Minardi has argued in her recent dissertation, a means of not only linking the past and present, but also a means of remaking both. In commemorations, the past is simultaneously remembered, forgotten, and remade as a tool to reshape the present. In this commemoration I will recall a century of historical writing, quite selectively, and many of you might think quite eccentrically, to try to shape the present of historical writing and our public activities in the world.1 |
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I am acting, I want to emphasize, as a commemorator. Ian Tyrrell is already doing a history of the organization and doing it better than I could. Commemorating is a much more modest endeavor. Like memory, myth, fiction, and filmmaking, commemorating makes claims on the past, and the differences between these claims and history cannot be reduced down to true and false. To make things even more difficult, these various approaches also can mix. Historians have memories and historians find themselves commemorators.2 |
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History and commemorating are both forms of mediation between present and past, but history has rules about constructing the past. Our historical standards are clear. We can add to existing historical accounts with new and neglected evidence, but not subtract from them. We can interpret, but only within strict professional rules. We are a discipline. These rules do not apply to commemorating, as any Fourth of July speech, college commencement address, or centennial celebration will demonstrate. |
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Commemorating is a lot easier for people who think the past is plastic and whose goal is forgetting everything that is not, as they used to say when I taught in Utah, faith promoting. Yet in remaining a historian and acting as a commemorator, I gravitate to the common ground between them: both forms are political mediations that attempt to muster the past to change the present. For a century now, we as historians have aspired to be true to the past as the people we study understood it and to make that past available to the present to do work in the world.3 One price historians pay for mediation is that part of their histories are not only mortal, they are so transient that they usually do not even outlive the historian. As mediators, we can achieve only temporary success. The world changes too fast. It outdistances our histories. |
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None of this is new. Discussions of such issues are one of the constants of what I am modestly going to call the OAH century. Carl Becker, who wrote so compellingly about so many things and who seems to reappear as often as we summarily dismiss him, made the same points in 1921. He was reviewing H. G. Wells's The Outline of History, a well-worn copy of which survives from my father's bookshelves but is now buried in a storage locker that I have not set foot in for three years.4 My failure to search for it so I could wave it dramatically before you is an example of my limits as a commemorator. |
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