Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life

Conclusion: Finding Our Place

Conclusion: Finding Our Place If history were thought of as an activity rather than a profession, then the numbers of its practitioners would be legion. —Raphael Samuel, 1994 205 Fig. 60. Relics from the Donner party on display near the Pioneer monument at Donner Lake. This photo may have been taken at the time of the monument’s dedication in 1918. Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento. R ETURNING FROM California, I soon find myself back in the classroom. After the excitement of living someplace new, in a part of the country with lots of new construction and few clouds in the sky, it is hard to readjust to the humid East, the stale air of the crumbling concrete building in which I work, the familiar responsibilities of my job. This semester, the job includes teaching the required historiography course, a graduate seminar introducing students to the history of the historical profession and important historical works of the past century. The course is designed to impart a sense of history to a new generation of professionals, and surrounded by a dozen first-year students, I recall the scene of my own education as a historian. Our seminar table in Amherst is much less solid than the one at which I sat in Baltimore over twenty years ago; modern, functional, interchangeable, its peeling wood-grain Formica not quite concealing the particleboard beneath, it wobbles. Though my students deserve better, the shaky footing is somehow appropriate for our subject matter. What will it mean to be a historian in the new century? I surely cannot tell my students, as I was told, that full-time appointments teaching in colleges and universities await them when they finish their Ph.D. 206 CONCLUSION degrees. Nor can I tell them, as I was told, that their scholarship will form important building blocks in the edifice of History. After the epistemological upheavals of the past two decades, with the distinction between knower and known all but collapsed, with so many multiple perspectives on the past, it is hard to think of historical knowledge as cumulative. Do we really know more about the past, or only different things? Looking around the table, I ask myself what elements of my professional identity, which truths of what I learned was History, do I want to pass on? I face a similar question in concluding this book, in deciding what I want my readers to come away with from these diverse essays. They weave us in and out of Americans’ relationships with the past in the twentieth century, exploring some of the forms through which we commonly encounter history in public, our war memorials and civic celebrations , our television programs and historic sites. But do they add up to anything? Can we understand this series of discrete investigations as more of a history, and discern trends over time likely to continue into the future? What can these chapters tell us about how Americans will think about history in the new century? What do they say about the place of the historical profession in shaping this thought? It is much harder to trace the evolution of popular notions of history in the twentieth century than the historiography of the profession. While historiography reconstructs the sequence of ideas and influences among a group of professionals who more or less agreed to practice history in a similar way, the sheer diversity of popular approaches to the past, especially in recent years, makes it impossible to narrow the scope of our inquiry. But we can try to identify what the various forms of history have had in common, as they changed over time. The number of historical institutions and activities has grown steadily throughout the twentieth century. Over the past hundred years, Americans have accumulated a vast collection of public historic sites, museums, monuments, and holiday celebrations, all intended to enhance our sense of history, to remind us of various aspects of our past. More and more places and objects have been set aside as historic, stretching the limits of what we can possibly maintain, in the hope that later generations will find value in at least something that we have saved for them, and not forget about us. The profusion of historical activities is the result of a number of FINDING OUR PLACE...