The Uses of Memory: An Introduction

Abstract

In his classic essay His Own Historian, Carl Becker declared historians to be keepers of the myths. The idea of history as myth may be Becker's most memorable legacy, but word useful is equally important. For Becker, good history must be history, living history, history that does work in world. Historyboth personal and public-is unstable pattern of remembered things redesigned and newly colored to suit convenience of those who make use of it.11 This notion of contemporary usefulness of history, which Becker formulated so forcefully and well, lies at heart of study of historical memory, an area of history scholarship that has flourished in 1990s. Increasingly, historians seek to understand how people have constructed pasts that were to them in their own present. The subjects and sources for this new history are typically artifacts of public memory: monuments, battlefields, museums, and historic reconstructions; festivals, pageants, and celebrations; Hollywood movies and school textbooks. In other words, historians have been most interested in social or collective memory, often patriotic official history or countervailing unofficial histories mounted against it. But while memories may be constructed in culture and preserved in books, museums, or other public forms, they come alive in minds of individual people. It is instructive to recall that in Carl Becker's parable of history making, Everyman was an individual with an individual's historical problem: He needed to remember whether had paid his coal bill. Mr. Everyman cannot do what needs or desires to do without recalling past events, Becker wrote, and he cannot recall past events without in some subtle fashion relating them to what needs or desires to do.2 In two essays in this round table, Robert E. McGlone and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall refocus study of historical memory on individual. McGlone draws on recent research in cognitive psychology to show how over time John Adams rehearsed and reconstructed his memory of drafting of Declaration of Independence. Hall draws on autobiographical writings of three extraordinary sisters to show how individual and family memory could intersect in unexpected ways with public memory of American South. In each essay, individual is at center stage, and public historythe Declaration of Independence