Memory and Authority

This week, we read Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen's The Presence of the Past, the Introduction and Chapter 12 of Michael Frisch's A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, and Hyounggon Kim and Tazim Jamal's article, "Touristic Quest for Existential Authenticity." Once again, these readings left me with a lot to think about.

I'm interested to learn that public historians are just as fascinated by the role of memory in the creation of history as I am. The topic came up in both the Frisch reading and, obviously, in Rosenzweig and Thelen's book. I was especially struck by just how much difference among races there is in Rosenzweig and Thelen's survey results. For instance, African Americans and Native Americans seem to put much less store in books, teachers, and other "conventional" historical sources than do Caucasians. However, ethnic minorities seemed much more likely to discuss their collective memory and give their personal history a certain relation to past events and a larger history than whites were inclined to do. I think that this idea is something that public historians might be able to use to make exhibitions and the like more relatable to people of all races, but I also feel like it's something I need to think about more.

I felt Michael Frisch's book has a lot of practical applicability for public history. He sees public history as a two way street between historians and their audience. He states that public historians should not just view what they do as a passage of knowledge from one group to another, but as a way to "promote a more democratized and widely shared historical consciousness, consequently encouraging broader participation in debates about history." This seemed revelatory to me, though on its surface fairly simple. I think this is the idea we've been trying to iterate in class. Frisch talks about it as being an issue of "to" vs. "with." As in, public history shouldn't be something spoon fed to an audience, but created with them. Food for thought.

I haven't quite concluded how I felt about the Kim and Jamal article. I spent a lot of time with my trusty two-ton Webster's unabridged dictionary while reading the article and I'm not sure if that's a reflection of my lack of vocabulary or the technical jargon in the piece. I thought that Rosenzweig and Thelen did an excellent job of quantitating experience, but this is a practice of which I'm generally skeptical. I'm not sure that Kim and Jamal were able to quantitate experience to a similar effect. I noticed a few contradictions in their research, which made me question their bigger conclusions. For instance, "Bethany" says that she can unrestrain herself and flirt at the Renaissance Festival celebrations and that flirting means nothing to her; she claims her male counterparts are aware of the lack of meaning behind her actions. But later, "Edmund" says such female behaviors have changed his self-perception and self-esteem. Clearly, such flirting is not meaningless to him. This is but one example and I think maybe Kim and Jamal's study would have benefited from deeper psychological examinations of the factors at play at the Renaissance Festival events. Overall, I didn't take as much away from their work as I did from Rosenzweig and Thelen's survey. I am greatly interested to hear if others in the class had similar or differing views.