DANCEST 303 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Gettysburg Address, Reform Act 1832, Bastion
Document Summary
History vs. memory: history/ past: universal, neutral order of past events as they happened (they actually happened, memory: particular, selective, biased, hierarchizing, temporally limited, subjective view; central function: identity construction (delimiting function) Relationship culture- remembering happenings (that something is remembered manifests itself culturally) Forms (things can be shaped and erased or particularly celebrated), content, functions (they fulfill in the present) of collective relation to past (we have a history as a group, not only here and now counts) Memory is not just a mirror but consists of reconstructions. Collective memories have a material, social (what is acceptable/unacceptable) and mental dimension. Historiography (i. e. history writing) produces merely one version of history (not neutral) History writing as storytelling, creation of specific version of history (cf. concepts of invented tradition) and of imagined communities. Stephen hawking died a couple of months ago; his ashes have been buried in westminster abbey.
