After reading this chapter in the Stearns, Seixas and Wineburg book, I had some thoughts about historical thinking that might answer some of the questions that I had about how useful historical thinking is. In particular, the following passage inspired a great deal of thought:
…each day we awake to the morning news – whether by unfolding the paper or by pointing our browsers to www.cnn.com – calls us to be a historian. Or maybe we aren’t called. Maybe the only thing that accompanies the cacophony of modernity is the call to choose those messages that make us feel good about ourselves, our group, our faith, or our race. Perhaps this is the sole imperative of contemporary society, where the past emerges as a treasure trove available to us in building our identity. Heritage, like history, uses the past, but it makes no pretense of being self-critical…” (p. 311)
Here lies a tension – history versus heritage. This is important to note because Wineburg points that heritage tends to be conflated with history, and this forms part of the mechanism whereby individuals become historical beings, but historical beings who lack the self-critical nature of proper historical thinking. Now while historical beings created in this manner are often benign, Wineburg notes that the “sixteen- and seventeen-year-old adversaries lay waste to each other’s villages and shell each other into oblivion, they do so as historical beings.” (p. 307) I would venture to guess, that these ‘historical beings’, as with many other historical beings engaged in ethnic conflict, possess the ability to look at their own history self-critically.
I understand that the United States, and Canada probably will not have to deal with ethnic cleansing in their respective countries, but the tensions between heritage and history are felt. Professor Kelly mentioned the case of the Texan PhD student, adamantly believing that Texas was the only state to be an independent republic prior to becoming a state, later refusing to accept evidence that showed that indeed California and Vermont were also republics. Here is a case of the heritage vs. history tension, in this case heritage is materializing itself as nationalism. Nationalism creeps its way into history education through senate debates on the content of U.S. history curriculae, to debates over what should be shown in an Enola Gay exhibit. North of the border, the nationalist debate in Quebec is a good example as well. Quebec textbooks dealing with the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War) have long been criticized for presenting a lop-sided account of the conflict. Although it may seem trivial, the motto of Quebec, which appears on all the license plates as well as well carved into the curiously titled Assemblee Nationale du Quebec (National Assembly of Quebec) is ‘Je me souviens’ – ‘I remember’. This of course begs the question, what do you remember? Is it the textbook accounts of Quebec history? Is it French heritage? Is it a balanced historical perspective of the rise and fall of New France, and the subsequent existence of a distinct dual culture under British rule? I’m guessing probably not the latter. I will end here, lest I go off on a rant on Quebec politics, but I feel that Wineburg brought up some very relevant points in this essay regarding the tensions between history and heritage, and the post-modern tendency to blur the two, very distinct things.