Cali Pitchel McCullough is a Ph.D student in American history at Arizona State University. For earlier posts in this series click here. –JF
This week Cali is writing final exams, so her “dispatch” for the week is the introduction to one of those exams. Enjoy part of her reflection on the meaning of history.
As human beings one of our greatest capacities is remembering. It is a primal instinct, a human phenomenon. We can never escape the constant process of remembering. So critical to man and woman is remembering that we celebrate and memorialize events from the past—some individual (a birthday or anniversary) and others collective (Fourth of July or President’s Day)—all in an attempt to relive our history. A deep desire to remember what happened, even beyond a simple personal recollection, keeps people intimately interested in the past.
Despite an unfailing commitment to preserving and remembering the past, experiences will be forgotten, sometimes before we even have a chance to remember them. Robert Eric Frykenberg,when reflecting on the nature of historical understanding, acknowledges that the information we hold in our minds about the past “is like water from a river cupped into our hands.” This fleeting store of water,“from which drops keep falling back into the river,” can never again “be recaptured in our hands.”[i] The loss of the drops, although seemingly tragic, is a reminder that forgetting will always be a part of remembering. People have and will continue to attempt to combat the ephemeral nature of the present moment—oral lore, dairies, photographs, and woodcarvings are just a few of the means by which people help to preserve what might otherwise be lost forever. Implicit in this pursuit is the belief that the past has something to offer, that there is a historical truth to capture before it’s swept away by the river of forgetfulness.
Those drops we so desperately attempt to collect, the ones that we manage to keep from seeping through our stiff fingers, are history—that which we retrieve and reconstruct. The telling or writing of such a tale is history, too. The Oxford English Dictionary defines history as both a noun and a verb. History is “A relation of incidents…a narrative, tale, story,” but it is also “to record, narrate, recount.”[ii] Thus, history is the action of human beings turning the lens onto and giving an account of a specific moment in an earlier time. What they do is history, what they produce is history, and the banner under which historians unite is history. It is a discipline. And although remembering seems to be an innate capacity, both timeless and global, it is the historian who commits to the lifelong pursuit of preserving memories in bound copies and academic journals. A historian does not pave streets or clean teeth, but he or she does perform a function that responds to that human desire to know the past. The results of history writing are less tangible, but no less important than even pavement or cavity-free mouths. To capture the past is to respond to human need, a pursuit that may not be value-free, but does indeed have immense significance.
[i] Frykenberg, Robert E. History and Belief: The Foundations of Historical Understanding (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co.,1996), 47. [ii] Oxford English Dictionary.
Wow…. simply wow. Dr. Fea, please tell her that her passion for history and the process of doing history is not only evident in her writing, but inspiring. For a non-professional student of history, it is people like her, that I look forward to reading about in the near future.
Jamie: Thanks for this comment. I know it meant a lot to Cali.