10,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Why It Matters
- Sprache: Englisch
We justify our actions in the present through our understanding of the past. But we live in a time when politicians lie brazenly about historical facts and meddle with the content of history books, while media differ wildly in their reporting of the same event. Frequently, new discoveries force us to re-evaluate everything we thought we knew about the past. So how can any certainty about history be established, and why does it matter? Lynn Hunt shows why the search for truth about the past, as a continual process of discovery, is vital for our societies. History has an essential role to play in ensuring honest presentation of evidence. In this way, it can foster humility about our present-day concerns, a critical attitude toward chauvinism, and an openness to other peoples and cultures. History, Hunt argues, is our best defense against tyranny. Introducing Polity's Why It Matters series; in these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 144
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
1 Now More Than Ever
Lying
Monuments
Textbook Controversies
Memory Wars
Public History and Collective Memory
Notes
2 Truth in History
Facts
Interpretations
Historical Truth and Eurocentrism
Provisional Truths
Notes
3 History’s Politics
Elite History
The First Breach
Pushing Open the Doors
History and Citizenship
Notes
4 History’s Future
The Globe’s History
The Ethics of Respect
Notes
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
Polity’s Why It Matters series
In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.
Lynn Hunt, HistoryTim Ingold, AnthropologyNeville Morley, Classics
History
Why It Matters
Lynn Hunt
polity
Copyright © Lynn Hunt 2018
The right of Lynn Hunt to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2555-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hunt, Lynn, 1945-Title: History : why it matters / Lynn Hunt.Description: 1 | Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Series: Why it matters | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017059695 (print) | LCCN 2017060653 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509525577 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509525539 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509525546 (paperback)Subjects: LCSH: History--Philosophy. | History--Social aspects. | History--Political aspects. | Historiography. | BISAC: HISTORY / General.Classification: LCC D13 (ebook) | LCC D13 .H854 2018 (print) | DDC 901--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059695
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
1Now More Than Ever
Everywhere you turn, history is at issue. Politicians lie about historical facts, groups clash over the fate of historical monuments, officials closely monitor the content of history textbooks, and truth commissions proliferate across the globe. As the rapid growth in history museums shows, we live in a moment obsessed with history, but it is also a time of deep anxiety about historical truth. If it is so easy to lie about history, if people disagree so much about what monuments or history textbooks should convey, and if commissions are needed to dig up the truth about the past, then how can any kind of certainty about history be established? Are heritage sites and historical societies set up to provoke, console, or simply divert? What is the purpose of studying history? This book lays out the questions and offers ways of answering them. It will not resolve all the quandaries, since history is by definition a process of discovery and not a settled dogma. But it can show why history matters now more than ever.
Lying
In one of the highest profile examples of lying about history, real estate developer Donald Trump came to public attention in 2012 by insinuating that then President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and so had been illegitimately elected president. When Obama presented his birth certificate, confirming that he had been born in the state of Hawaii, Trump immediately retorted that it might be fraudulent, even though he had no evidence that it was falsified.1 During the presidential campaign in 2016, Trump abruptly changed course and admitted that Obama was born in the United States. He proceeded to take credit for ending a controversy that he helped fabricate. That phony polemic now attracts fewer devotees but other fake ones endure, the most prominent being Holocaust denial.
Politicians and a few writers on the extreme right in Europe have sought their fifteen minutes of fame by denying the reality of the deliberate murder of six million Jews between 1933 and 1945. Denial can take various forms, from asserting that many fewer than six million died or that Hitler and the Nazis had no official plan for genocide to the notion that the gas chambers did not exist. Holocaust denial has become the model for those who want to lie about history; its promoters simply refuse to admit the validity of eyewitness accounts of victims and of those who liberated the concentration camps as well as the subsequent painstaking historical research that has established the names and numbers of those killed and traced the means and motives of the perpetrators in excruciating detail. Although historians can and do disagree about how best to interpret the Holocaust, no serious scholar or reader of history doubts the truth that these murders were deliberate and took place on a mass scale.
Yet despite repeated refutations based on mountains of documentation, and despite the exemplary official and unofficial German efforts to come to terms with those crimes, Holocaust denial still percolates across Europe and the rest of the world, often via social media such as Facebook.2 It receives robust support at the highest levels of some Middle Eastern governments, which find it useful as part of an anti-Israel policy. On December 14, 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust “a myth.” The official Iranian news agency took those words out of the transcript of his speech as if they had never been uttered, thereby replacing one lie with another.3 Denials of the Holocaust, however far-fetched or unsubstantiated, have had their effect: an international survey conducted in late 2013 and early 2014 showed that among people living in the Middle East and North Africa, only one-fifth of those who had heard of the Holocaust believed that historical accounts of it were accurate.4
Blatant lying about history has become more common owing to the influence of social media. The world-wide web has enabled historical lies to flourish because on the internet virtually anyone can post anything under any name, without prior scrutiny and with no possible sanction. The most outlandish claims circulate widely and gain a measure of credibility just because they are circulating. In this situation, insisting on historical truth has become a necessary act of civic courage.
Historians are rarely subject to the death threats, fatwas, or actual assassinations that threaten journalists, novelists, and opposition figures in too many places, but they have often found themselves at the center of controversy. Authoritarian governments do not like historians known for insisting on inconvenient truths. The popular French historian Jules Michelet was fired from his teaching position by the government of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851 because students sometimes left his rousing lectures shouting anti-government slogans. The police had sent undercover agents to attend his classes and then released doctored copies of his lecture notes in the hopes of tainting his reputation. Several of Michelet’s colleagues cravenly agreed to censure his teaching to prepare the way for government action. He was then fired from his position at the national archives for refusing to take a loyalty oath after Louis-Napoleon executed a coup against the legislature, which had refused to grant his request for a waiver of his term limit. Michelet, however, was luckier than the hundreds of other opponents of the coup who were arrested and forcibly transported to the penal colony of Cayenne in French Guiana.5
As the example of Michelet shows, even normally mild-mannered historians can find themselves in the line of fire in times of political or international crisis. In 1940, Time magazine reported that the author of a popular history textbook in the United States, Harold Rugg, had been accused of being a communist who depicted the United States as a land of unequal opportunity and class conflict. Labeled a “subversive” because he failed to teach “real Americanism,” Rugg had his books banned by some school districts and even publicly burned by a school board official in one Ohio town.6 Textbook authors and in particular textbook publishers will usually go to great lengths to avoid controversy in order to appeal to the broadest possible markets, but as the example of Rugg demonstrates, disputes about historical truth are always lurking around the corner.
Monuments
In mid-August 2017, a public quarrel about the fate of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee ended in violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. White nationalists who opposed the city council’s decision to remove the statue from Emancipation Park (formerly Lee Park) paraded with torches on the University of Virginia campus shouting slogans recalling the Nazi era, and the next day their altercations with counter-protesters ended in general brawling near the statue itself. A neo-Nazi drove his car into the counter-protesters, killing one young woman. A monument in place for ninety-three years can provoke strong feelings when it is seen as standing for something repugnant, in this case racism. The Lee statue is not alone. Confederate flags and monuments are in dispute in several states of the former Confederacy: those who want them removed consider them present-day symbols of white supremacy, while those who oppose their ejection cast such efforts as a willful erasure of history. Days after the events in Charlottesville, anti-fascists in Durham, North Carolina, took it upon themselves to topple a statue of a Confederate soldier.
Monuments are not just an issue in the southern United States. Like students at Yale University who wanted to change the name of Calhoun College because it was named after a pro-slavery politician, students at Oxford campaigned for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes because he was a racist and arch-imperialist. These tame versions of proposed monument removal pale next to those that have rocked countless places in turmoil: after the defeat of Hitler, the allies ordered the immediate destruction of all Nazi symbols; after the fall of the Soviet Union, crowds tore down monuments to Lenin and Stalin from Ukraine to Ethiopia; a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein was dismantled in 2003 during the US-led invasion; in 2008 the last statue in Spain of the dictator Franco was removed; and, to go back more than two centuries, a few days after the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, New Yorkers pulled down a gilded equestrian statue of King George III.
Sometimes monument destruction is viewed as vandalism. When the Taliban blew up 1,500-year-old stone statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan in 2001, or when Isis dynamited 2,000-year-old Roman ruins in Palmyra, Syria, in 2015, condemnation of the seemingly senseless demolition of the world’s cultural heritage was universal. Islamic militants claimed they were destroying idols, which linked them with a long history of iconoclasm, the breaking or destroying of images, especially religious images, for religious reasons. The term first referred to conflicts in the 700s and 800s over the use of religious images (icons) in the Byzantine Empire. Iconoclasts rejected the growing profusion of images in Christianity and in many instances removed or destroyed them. At the beginning of the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, especially in Dutch, Swiss, and French cities, mobs sometimes broke into churches and destroyed statues and other decorations considered idolatrous. History therefore seems to provide mixed messages about monument removal.
The ambiguities derive from the nature of monuments. Monuments commemorate: that is, they recall the past and solicit veneration for it. As a consequence, even when they are supposedly secular, such as the statue of General Lee, they inevitably incorporate a kind of religious feeling. Yet monuments are always made for political purposes; they assert power, whether the power of a church, a sect, a political party, or a political cause, such as the Confederacy. Because of this association with power, changes of religious affiliation or political regime often entail monument destruction as well as monument creation. The early Christian churches in Europe were built over the remains of pagan or Roman temples as a way of physically announcing their superiority. In fact, the long history of the destruction of “antiquities” shows that monument destruction is part and parcel of life. (The term “antiquities” only appeared in English in the 1500s, which indicates a new sensibility about annihilating remnants of the far distant past, in this case Roman and Greek remains.)
The paradoxes of monument destruction came most clearly into view in the French Revolution of 1789. The revolutionaries themselves invented the term “vandalism” in 1794 to condemn the overly zealous attempts of some militants to de-Christianize France by seizing gold and silver from the churches, knocking the heads off statues of kings on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and turning churches into temples of Reason. Some churches were sold off and turned into granaries or warehouses. The leaders of the Revolution argued that while symbols of feudalism and monarchy could be legitimately destroyed, those with Latin inscriptions and anything compatible with the spirit of equality ought to be protected. The revolutionaries had already set up the world’s first national museum of art in the Louvre palace in 1793 with works confiscated from the crown, the church, and aristocrats who had emigrated. In 1795 the revolutionaries opened the first museum of French monuments with sculpture and tombs scavenged from various religious houses. In short, vandalism and preservation can go hand in hand; the attack on monuments of the past prompted the revolutionaries themselves to think about cultural patrimony. Hated symbols could be preserved if they could be rebranded as art.
The monuments issue can never be definitively resolved. The entire past cannot be preserved because no one wants to live in a museum. Yet some of the past must be preserved in order to maintain a sense of connection and continuity over time. The question is what should be preserved, and that is an inevitably political question. How do we see ourselves, to which past are we most connected, and which parts of that past should be preserved? Every case has to be decided on its own merits, and historical research provides crucial evidence, for example, into the motives of those who commissioned and built the statue of General Lee. Subsequent generations will undoubtedly revisit the decisions. History does not stand still, even if most monuments do.
Textbook Controversies
History textbooks are always being revised, but that only makes them more contentious. One Japanese candidate for governor of Tokyo in 2015 insisted that “As a defeated nation we only teach the history forced on us by the victors.” He continued, “To be an independent nation again we must move away from the history imposed on us.” Japan was not the aggressor in World War II, he insisted, did not commit the notorious massacre at Nanjing, China, in 1937, and did not force Korean women to serve as “comfort women” (sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers.7 The controversy was not new. Ten years before, in 2005, Chinese and Korean demonstrators protested revisions in a textbook prepared by
