Horizon

Yeah, I think Burns is terribly overrated.

There is the very memorable moment in Gimme Shelter, the documentary of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont by the Maysles Brothers. Toward the end the Maysles brought the band into a studio and showed them the footage of the guy being stabbed in the front row, so you see the subjects of the documentary watching the documentary within the documentary. Maybe that's not the kind of grappling you mean, but it seems worth mentioning.

For Christmas my daughter gave me The Longest Winter by Alex Kershaw (it was okay). On the cover was a photo of three soldiers at a post dug in the snow, looking very much on edge, waiting for an attack. An impressive shot until you realize they are looking towards the camera. Then I remembered looking at some of my father’s photographs from the war. He was in a cannon company in the 8th Division (I think) and I believe the shots were taken while they were in the Hurtgen Forest (maybe). There are a few where they are loading shells into a Howitzer and the activity looks pretty intense. I told him it was amazing to see what it was like for him to be in battle. He laughed and said, “You don’t really think when we were in action we had one of the guys standing around taking pictures, do you?”

Your question about grappling with methodology (and this may be a touch off topic) makes me think of the forts not too far from here at Crown Point, on the New York side of Lake Champlain. Fort Saint-Frédéric was pretty much destroyed by the French in 1759 as they evacuated in the face of Amherst’s approach from the south. Fort Amherst was built further back from the lake, and I think its demise can be blamed on stone-haulers after the Revolution. The State of New York has chosen to simply preserve what ruins are left, rather than build recreations. There is a small, modest museum to give you some background, but for the most part it’s up to your imagination, as you wander over the grassy earthen ramparts, drill grounds, and remaining stoneworks, to see how it must have been, so far from home, in an unfriendly wilderness. It is a visually and emotionally powerful place.

Somewhat along these off-topic lines, I can recommend The New History in an Old Museum, which is a look at the way Colonial Williamsburg has developed methodologically over the past half century. One of the problems for the urban landscapers is: should they seek to recreate the park in an "authentic" colonial style (bearing in mind that ideas about what is authentic change all the time), or should they preserve the grounds in the style which previous generations considered authentic, because the historiographical anachronisms of the 1940s and 50s contain a value of their own?

On this last, I'm interested to hear from my dad that the Sturbridge Village reenactment center in Massachusetts isn't doing so well lately. Is there something about picture-postcard reenactment that's going out of style?

The point about The New History in an Old Museum is that Williamsburg isn't a picture-postcard reenactment in the way it perhaps used to be.

or should they preserve the grounds in the style which previous generations considered authentic, because the historiographical anachronisms of the 1940s and 50s contain a value of their own?

Never had us pegged as one of those postmodern shops. Are you suggesting that Williamsburg might be more valuable as an example of how Americans in the 40s and 50s imagined life in the colonies?

Of course once you start thinking that because ideas of authenticity have changed that it's "relative", then you have the problem that the same thing applies to the 50s and also to representation of our own time, to the point where Colonial Williamburg will strictly speaking henceforward only tell us something about itself.

I admit the idea sounds interesting, but you'd have to rename the park at the very least, wouldn't you? What would such a park be called?

"Colonial Itselfburg"

It's been a while since I read the book so I can't remember exactly how the arguments developed, but straining for authenticity doesn't necessarily mean ignoring the museum's own past. I think the suggestion was to leave a part of the complex as it was in the 1950s, and signpost it prominently as a historical recreation that nowadays isn't considered accurate. The point of which isn't to say that we're so much cleverer than they were, but rather that no recreation is ever unproblematic (something museums are usually loathe to admit to the public) and that they are as much about our preconceptions as they are those of the past.

Well, that sounds like a great idea to me, though I still think it will inevitably have a certain cast of "we're cleverer than that" about it, even if the designers go out of their way to disavow such intentions.

I mean, isn't it necessary, whatever we might say, to believe that we are more right than they were? Without that the whole enterprise just collapses, doesn't it?

Perhaps the point is more that future generations will think us just as ignorant as we think the historians in the 1950s were.

Perhaps the point is more that future generations will think us just as ignorant as we think the historians in the 1950s were.

So would you say that there haven't been significant methodological improvements in that time? What do you think mostly accounts for such shifting views of the past?

I believe it was the Musée de l'Amérique française in Quebec where Sara and I saw a wonderful exhibit on the history of the early exploration and evangelization of New France. Apparently the museum had kept the same mannequins in the same scenes since the 1930s, but had been sprucing up their dress and poses over the decades.

The current curators fished the older clothing out of the attic and managed to make each scene both about the events and their interpretation, so they had the 1630 scene arranged as it had been in 1930, the 1670 scene as it was in 1950, etc. You got to see different academic fashions interact with clothing fashion, while still seeing the underlying story. Who knew that late 1950's filiopietism went so well with turquoise and fringe?

The National Museum of the American Indian branch in New York does that well, or did as of about five years ago when we visited. Interesting comments on the distinction between artwork and artifiact and the way exhibits about the American tribes used to discuss them in the past tense.

So how specifically has Williamsburg updated?

So would you say that there haven't been significant methodological improvements in that time?

No, of course not. We know more about the past now than we did then. But we haven't reached 'the end of history', and no doubt today's reconstructors are making errors that will be identified by tomorrow's reconstructors. And so on.

It's not just about factual mistakes, in any case. It's also a question of priorities and interests. The 'old' Williamsburg saw itself as the recreation of a mannered colonial elite, in which other people - workers, slaves, etc. - played a marginal role. This wasn't 'wrong' so much as narrow in focus. Today there's much more emphasis on the stories of people from the lower ranks. Who know, perhaps future generations will feel that we drifted too far away from the elites and will want to shift focus again.

So how specifically has Williamsburg updated?

There's a charming book on sale for $22.95 which will give you all the specifics you need ...

The point is that every event, moment, period has memory and interpretation attached to it; and each succeeding generation piles more memories and interpretations on top. History is always what we think or believe it is, even when we're removed only minutes from it. When you ask a platoon to re-enact taking a hill, even though they actually had taken that hill, what you get is really a film of the people who took that hill performing how they thought it must have looked, or how they remembered it being. The picture of my father loading a howitzer is a picture of how he believed he looked when he was really loading a howitzer during an engagement.

So when I got off onto historic sites I wasn't going that far off topic because it's the same approach to our presentation of how things were. There's nothing wrong with a Colonial Williamsburg and nothing egregiously dishonest about it, but it's not true because truth is this constantly moving thing that depends so much on memory. So I prefer a Crown Point, which says nobody knows how it really was and the people who did are dead and even if they were alive they wouldn't remember it correctly; so go out and create your own truth because if we go any further in trying to create it for you, you'll end up with a memory of this place as a souvenir shop where you bought that rubber tomahawk.

Unfortunately, no amount of incoherent run-on sentences (as I write this I have a mental image of myself as an author of incoherent run-on sentences) helps the honest historian.

But we can know the hill was taken even if we don't know what precise attitudes were struck while doing so.

Actually, in many cases we don't even know if the hill was 'taken' (as opposed to, say, being abandoned by its terrified former owners). After-Action reports, the dessicated reconstructions of events that no-one really remembers well, are a fascinating example of the gap between history-as-objective-truth and history as mutually agreed fabrication.

Do you think many Americans understand that the famous flag-raising at Iwo Jima was really the second raising? That's not to say that it was posed because I don't believe it was. But when people see the picture or the statue they think of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.

Depends what you mean by 'posed' - I forget the details but I think those taking part (the second time) were conscious of the fact that they were being photographed in a tableux, though obviously they weren't to know how iconographic their actions would eventually become.

In the same way, ISTR that the famous picture of a Soviet soldier raising the Hammer and Sickle over the Reichstag was staged too. And MacArthur walked back and forth in the Luzon surf so many times announcing that He Had Returned that you could probably make a beach party movie from the cuttings.

I am reminded of the John Fowles line (though I can't properly source it): If you want to be true to life, start lying about it.

As opposed to the David Mamet line, "Always tell the truth: it's the easiest thing to remember."

After-Action reports, the dessicated reconstructions of events that no-one really remembers well, are a fascinating example of the gap between history-as-objective-truth and history as mutually agreed fabrication.

If history is the study of mutually agreed fabrication, then wouldn't that mean that the study of history is just a slightly specialized subfield of rhetoric?

Or perhaps is there a kind of continuum between completely false and almost true.

If history is the study of mutually agreed fabrication, then wouldn't that mean that the study of history is just a slightly specialized subfield of rhetoric?

I think Maichael Frayn's play Copenhagen covers my feelings on this question. (And Martha, before you ask: no, go and read it yerself).

Ah, there goes Heisenberg again. Damn, it went through here some years ago but I was broke at the time. Guess I'll put another one on the pile. Working full time and taking an upper division history class really puts a dent in one's time for elective reading.

Alan Allport wrote:
'Perhaps the point is more that future generations will think us just as ignorant as we think the historians in the 1950s were.'

Well that's a cinch up their with death and taxes:
'negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.'
Samuel Johnson