A Comedic History Break

This comic from Pearls Before Swine captures exactly how I often feel about history and its aficionados:




I fell off my chair when I read this. Really. Right off.

Have you ever experienced the horror of telling someone a historical nugget that, to you, is intensely interesting, only to look at the receiver of your tale and see a thick, clear glaze over their eyes? It seems to happen to me almost every time I open my mouth.

To the historian, be they amateur or professional, tidbits of history like the one in the comic above can seem like the blood of everyday life. To others, though, they may (read: most likely) are irrelevant and dull. Part of the reason why I enrolled in the Public History program at Western was an idealistic bent of mine that wants to improve upon history-telling of the sort depicted in Pearls Before Swine.

I do not think that history has to be boring, but I admit that it often is. I have no prescription for how to change this. All I can say is that I know interesting history when I see (or hear, or read, or listen to) it, but that what is interesting to me may be lifeless to another.

I didn't mean for this post to be intellectual at all; I just wanted to share the comic. Then I got thinking about it and dug a little hole from which I cannot seem to extricate myself. So instead of trying to climb out, I'll dig deeper and request that anyone with an interest in history think before they next speak about a history topic. You may be doing more harm than good.

Photography, Shmotography (Part One)

In researching and crafting the text for my artefacts for our class exhibit on inventions and innovations in London, I have been thinking about why people feel the need to document their lives. The items I am working on are a Ciné-Kodak Model B movie camera, and a Bell & Howell Filmo Ciné Projector (both dating from about 1925). One area that I have been thinking about, and that I did not get to address in the exhibit work, is the effect that photography and filmmaking has on our ability to tell our stories. So, I decided to think about that here.

Some people will argue that photography and filmmaking are nothing if not the stories of our lives. I disagree. I think that images (both still and moving) are quite often poor substitutes for the stories they attempt to relate.

According to documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, photographs are false pathways to memory. Real memory, as I heard on CBCs The Current for November 16, 2006, is created in the mind. While photos can trigger memories, they are not the memories themselves (My classmate, Molly, wrote a great blog about something quite similar to this). Yet, we increasingly rely on photography and other images (like films) to document the past, rather than using our brains to hold those memories.

Images have a valuable place in our world, to be sure. My fear is the potential erosion of our memories – and collective memory – that comes along with our reliance upon them. While images are valuable for those who were not present to be able to get some sense of the past, are they really a substitute for the real memory? (I suppose you could ask me what “real memory” is, and I would have to concede that that is a fair question, and I do not have the answer for it. What I mean, in this case, by real memory, is the memory of the past contained within our heads).

Photographs do not stand in as a record of the reality of what happened. And I recognize that no credible historian would tell me to use photos as my sole source when looking into the past. I also admit that the memories inside our heads are far from perfect. The historian in me believes that history is story. My fear is that many of the stories that can and ought to be told are not, simply because people think it sufficient to supplement the story with an image.

To be continued…