The Myth of American Amnesia
Cultural critics from both sides of the spectrum have chided Americans for having an ahistorical relation to the past. Marxist historian Mike Wallace describes the United States as having a “historicidal culture,” [1] while conservative commentator Lynne Cheney laments that “a refusal to remember...is a primary characteristic of our nation.”[2]  Americans, it is argued, imagine themselves as perennially breaking free from the dead weight of tradition, forever on a road of capitalist and social progress that precludes an organic relationship with their roots. However, closer inspection reveals that the ordinary people of the United States are in fact deeply immersed in history, just not in a way that fits neatly into any one ideological or institutional framework.[3] Americans’ direct appropriation of the past to their present day concerns leads them to be unfairly written off as an ahistorical people. To the chagrin of conservatives, the inhabitants of the United States care more about their own individual stories than they do about any larger than life national mythology. To the frustration of leftists, Americans are not, as a whole, committed to any critical counter project which does not speak to their personal experiences. And to the confusion of those operating within the confines of institutional work, Americans pine for an immediate access to the past that bypasses the expertise of those in the historical professions.
Conservatives think Americans are forgetful of the glories of the national past because of the rise of liberal political correctness. For them, nation building and history making go together. For this reason, they fear that Americans are not sufficiently absorbing patriotic truths that will enable them to be good citizens. The right blames this on the machinations of leftist intellectuals, who allegedly can’t “afford to teach history because it would destroy the core vision of a hedonistic, existentialist America in which there is no past and no future, so you might as well have the bureaucrats decide.”[4] Even efforts by historical practitioners to expand the scope of national history are derided, because it allegedly dilutes attention from the real greats. Conservatives argue that too much focus on women, people of color, and non-ruling class figures puts trivial figures to the forefront while distorting the “real” heritage of the United States.[5]
The moral panic of the right, however, is misplaced. It is true that Americans on the whole say their familial past is more important to them than the history of the United States.[6] However this is not because they view the former as subsisting in a vacuum from the latter. Instead, Americans interweave the national into the familial. People and events from the past remain important to them because they are occasions for personal growth and communion with their roots. Furthermore, despite their own dismal memories of rote learning in high school, Â most Americans remain committed to civic and patriotic presentations of the past for their children.[7] Â On some level, they still want to reintegrate individual history within larger narratives. Instead of being dupes of liberal pied pipers, Americans are proactive synthesizers of the wider past with their more immediate personal concerns.
Rather than being alarmed like their rightwing counterparts by the prospect that Americans will remember Harriet Tubman instead of the Alamo, leftwing culture critics fear that people are all too willing to heed the tales spun by Washington and Wall Street. Leftists think Americans are amnesiac because they buy into a boosterist, chauvinistic, and heavily commodified version of history which forecloses the possibility of having an honest encounter with the uncomfortable legacies of the past. Not only are the citizens of the United States absorbing the wrong type of information, they are, it is said, absorbing it in an inauthentic way.[8] The pasts that often engage the interest of Americans “remain segregated from the present. We rummage around them for pleasure or profit, we appropriate them, we consume them, but we do not think it crucial to understand them in order to understand ourselves.”[9]
This view rests on a profound misunderstanding. It is true that most Americans do not express their relation to history in categories like race, class, or gender-concepts which are central to left-leaning history writing.[10] Furthermore, they generally use “the past to think about how individuals should live, not how society should be organized.”[11] However, this does not mean they are docile, undiscriminating sheep. As was already discussed, Americans appropriate public history to their own personal narratives, not vise versa. They are not simply passively absorbing repackaged ideologemes but they are utilizing what they know creatively to understand where they came from, who they are, and what can be done in the future.[12] Furthermore, while they may be ignorant of Adorno or Foucault, Americans do apply common sense critical capacities to the messages they receive about the past. Notably, they rank TV and movies low on their scale of trustworthy sources of information precisely because they are aware of how facts can be distorted by moneyed interests.[13] Despite lacking the goals or interpretive frameworks of progressive ideologies, Americans construct their own histories in ways that escape easy reduction to the talking points of Caesar or Mammon.
Americans do not trust “mediated” sources of information. Since all knowledge of the past is heavily mediated, this unfortunately means that most “official” and expert sources of authority are suspect. The contents of books are alleged to be distorted by the demands of commerce, the needs of entertainment, and the prejudices of the victors.[14] High school teachers are viewed as soporific bureaucrats forcing students to memorize rote lessons with no relevance to real life.[15]And while college professors were rated higher than the last two sources, they were still considered less trustworthy than the firsthand accounts of relatives. Given such attitudes, the alienation of the broader public from the work done by professional historians is to be expected.
In turn, historical workers have often perpetuated these distrustful attitudes by their own behaviors. The institutionalized practice of history has traditionally taken a standoffish attitude towards the ordinary people it is supposed to serve. As Trouillot observes, “guild” historians, because of their pretensions to being professionals, often avoid combining their scholarly activities with political commitments.[16] They repress the living significance of the past in order to make it a more neatly organized plane of manageable facts. This has meant that those looking for interpretations of the facts that matter to them are forced to look elsewhere.[17] And far too often, those curating museums and parks have considered tourists “a mass to be managed, not an audience of stakeholders to engage.”[18]
Despite all this, Americans remain drawn to uncovering their own pasts. They are fascinated by sources that they can know firsthand and can interrogate.[19] At the same time, they want to relate to the past as a space that is meaningful to them, as opposed to encountering it as a data dump that they have to memorize in order to earn a grade. These are the reasons for Americans’ passion for artifacts. The physical remains of the past both make history more vivid to the imagination and allow visitors to draw their own conclusions.[20]
      The personalizing approach to history characteristic of ordinary Americans has been misunderstood as a forgetfulness of the past. Conservatives have misconstrued the search for local meaning as unpatriotic apathy. Leftists mistake the quest for personal responsibility as uncritical acceptance of ruling class ideology. Institutional history makers confuse the ubiquitous distrust of authority for simple lack of interest. Pace their various critics, Americans all along have been eagerly producing history in their own way. This fact should suggest that there are rich possibilities for constructive dialogue between the public and the professions. As Joseph Shafer, a superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, declared in the 1920s: “Most people are tremendously interested in themselves, in their families, and in what their relatives have done, and by taking advantages of these natural instincts it would be possible to build up historical-mindedness among the people of our own and the next generation."[21]
The historical professions can reveal the latent interest of Americans in the past by tailoring their practices around the public instead of trying to tailor the public to their practices. Instead of isolating the past from the present, institutions can bring them face-to-face with each other. Instead of treating museum goers as merely visitors, curators can treat them as real stakeholders. Instead of presenting the past as an already accomplished fact, practitioners of history can make it their mission “to help members of the public do their own history and to aid them in understanding their role in shaping and interpreting events.”[22]
Museums can seek to make their exhibits more relevant by orienting them towards the needs of the present. As Trouillot said: “What needs to be denounced…to restore authenticity is much less slavery than the racist present within which representations of slavery are produced.”[23] The same can be said of any continuing historical legacy. Instead of treating time as being broken up into discrete parts, institutions can draw direct parallels between the problems of the past and the present. Exhibits could conclude by posing alternative solutions to a controversial topic that then can be voted upon by visitors.[24] That way, instead of presenting the past to visitors as a quaint heirloom, it can be shown to be a living inheritance that continues to spawn new questions. By using history as a springboard for contemporary praxis, museums can help strengthen the bond ordinary people have with the past in a way that talks with them instead of talking at them.
Those involved in the work of historical preservation can do more outreach to communities in order get a broader constituency involved in the process of creating and maintaining exhibits. Focusing on the local would not only enlist material support for institutions, it would also help focus researchers on issues that matter to the broader public. Further, historical practitioners can seek to ally themselves with contemporary struggles for freedom, equality, and subsistence in order to secure the conditions for a public interest in the study of the past. For “only when citizens are not confronted with the choice of a preserved past or a squalid present can preservationism have a secure future.”[25]
Americans seem to accept museum exhibits with their presentation of tangible objects as an unfiltered window into the past. They rank them as the most trustworthy sources, even placing them on a higher pedestal than the testimony of relatives.[26] Museums can build on this reservoir of good faith to make their visitors more educated consumers of information by foregrounding the interpretive process. Exhibits could be made that clarify the history of the presentation and the reception of artifacts over time. This can be done by presenting visitors with additional objects (memorandums, advertisements, propaganda posters, etc.) that they can judge for themselves. Instead of encouraging an idolatrous adoration of decontextualized objects, curators can use visitors’ love of artifacts to introduce them to the tools that will enable them to approach exhibits in a critical frame of mind.
Instead of trying to force Americans to confirm to the prescriptions of any pre-existing paradigm, practitioners of history can seek to meet the needs of Americans as they actually exist. More integration of the past with the present, more involvement with local communities, and more radical pedagogy can help bridge the gap between the professions and the public. Through the democratization of the study of history, Americans’ already existing passion for the past can be emancipated.
[1] Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 26.
[2]Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3.
[4] Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 295.
[5] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 277
[8] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 148
[9]Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), x.
[10] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 116.
[16] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 151.
[18]Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 163.
[19] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 95. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
[21] Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 103.
[22] Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), xxiii.
[23] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 148
[24] Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 52.
[26] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 105.
