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PART IV - HOW DOES MEMORY SHAPE HISTORY?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
According to the “Whig” narrative, world history is a series of long struggles and many detours that fortunately led to that apotheosis of mankind's political achievements, the British Empire of circa 1900 – as excellently demonstrated by (among many others) George Macaulay Trevelyan (see, for instance, Trevelyan, 1904). That is also the version of history gently satirized in the famous 1066 and All That, which, as the authors added in their subtitle, provided the reader with A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates (Sellar & Yeatman, 1930). The connection between memory and whiggish history is no coincidence. “Presentism,” that bogeyman of historiographers, is an unfortunate and ever-present temptation to see past events in the light of current norms and conditions. But it also manifests itself in the idea that the present is necessary – that history had to happen the way it did (Hawthorne, 1991; Tetlock, Lebow, & Parker, 2006). And if the past proves to be rather embarrassing, it should be transmogrified or omitted altogether, lest it ruins the flattering self-image on which rests a sound polity.
All this may seem familiar, but the studies surveyed by Craig Blatz and Michael Ross show how deep-seated the biases are, and how they operate even in the most “historically aware” of places.
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- Memory in Mind and Culture , pp. 219 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009