American History and the Structures of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography

Abstract

For over a decade now, I have been accumulating some fascinating data on the images of American history that my students have carried around in their heads before entering my classroom. The term data may be misleadingly scientific, and I am not even sure my hunting and gathering process deserves to be called research, since it began playfully, as little more than a tonic designed to fortify student recruits setting out on their uncertain trek across the arid reaches of the standard survey course. Increasingly, however, I have come to sense that there may be some broader meaning, or at least interest, in the picture gradually emerging from this experimentation. That sense has been recently sharpened by loud alarumsthe very lively debate about American education's role in the ominously accelerating historical amnesia reportedly afflicting high school and college students. As it happens, my modest experiments in what can be called empirical iconography, conducted well before that debate emerged, address its concerns quite directly, providing a certain reassurance in the face of the jeremiads while raising some disturbing questions of a rather different sort. Let me begin with some brief frame-setting observations about the problem at hand. I will then turn to a straightforward unfolding of my quasi-scientific data combined with some unlicensed flights of exegetical excess. I will conclude by returning to the contemporary debate about American education and historical memory, in order to see how different it may appear after our excursion into the realm of the collective historical subconscious, or at least that portion of it embodied in the responses of over one thousand students at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo) over the past decade. As a general matter, discussions of historical memory have not been very clear about the relation of individual-level processes-what and how we remember, whether about our own or more broadly historical experienceand the processes of collective memory, those broader patterns through which culture may shape the