She was kidnapped by Indians in Ohio, and she was, oh God, it was just, you know, all kinds of crazy stuff she used to tell us. I had a German-born grandmother who used to tell these wonderful, wild tales. No, it doesn’t have to, and that’s the problem.įabrication, yeah. There’s far more memory.Īt what point do they coincide? Do they have to coincide? Does memory have to have the evidence that you say history has? There’s more of it, if you think about it. The difference between history and memory is quite profound. Our job as historians, if we are traditionally trained historians, is to be able to write about the past in ways that hopefully-either through people reading us, but more likely through film and documentary, or even more likely through schooling-penetrate those stories that they carry in their heads, from their families, from their churches, with good, solid history. They got it by a variety of means, first family usually, grandparents in particular. Everyone walking around on the streets in Los Angeles right now has a sense of the past. And every person out there on the street beyond the window in this room has a sense of the past in their minds.
The narratives we believe we’re living in our heads are memory, collective memory. Sometimes that’s borne of their culture borne of their political persuasion borne of their sense of nationhood borne of their sense of an immigrant past.
Sometimes that’s borne of their ethnicity. Whether they get it from schooling, from family, from church, from political rhetoric, or however they come by it, memory is the sum of the stories that people believe they are living in. On the other hand, memory tends to be how real people-groups of people-process the past, and how they create stories and narratives of the past. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be done in the academy: There are lots of good historians who do not have academic jobs, and many of them are on the best seller list. It’s this reasoned reconstruction of the past from evidence. Well history tends to be, in my view, what historians do. What is the difference between memory and history? This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. They discussed the differences between memory and history, the three competing stories Americans tell about the Civil War, and why Walt Whitman is our death poet. He sat down with Zócalo Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Gregory Rodriguez to talk about his 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. He added that he was surprised-and delighted-to realize how much Americans continue to care about reading history. Blight said he was stunned when he heard the news, having worked on Douglass’ biography for most of his adult life. Earlier that day, The New York Times had named his most recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, one of the top ten books of the year. Blight, a historian at Yale University who has written seven books and edited many more, stopped by Zócalo’s offices in December of 2018.
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