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Chapter 6: Education Historians as Mythmakers

In the contemporary context of everyday life in the United States, history has acquired an array of meanings. In popular parlance, it connotes a condition of irrelevance. "That boyfriend is history," announces a teenager. "Another word and you're history," suggests Telly Sevalas or Clint Eastwood. "Virulent racial discrimination is history," asserts a MacNeilLehrer guest scholar as she consigns affirmative action programs and the heritage of slavery to an historical junk heap. Scholars are more eloquent and grandiose in their understanding of how history functions in everyday life. Some, convinced apparently that history lives and historians lie, invoke Voltaire to suggest that history is "a pack of tricks we [historians] play on the dead." Still others pay homage to the power of historical discourse in conjuring Santayana's warning that "those who forget the past are bound to repeat it," as though history itself functions as a kind of bad example. The simultaneous identification of history as utterly irrelevant on the one hand, and as totally powerful on the other, is hardly surprising. Implicit in these apparently contradictory views is an understanding, discovered in the last two decades, that historians function like other mythmakers in society. Through their analyses of the past, they reveal meaning and, when they do it well, make sense of reality. As they recover the past, they constitute vision, cultivate consciousness, consign to oblivion, and bring into collective memory (Bender, 1985; Bouwsma, 1981; Burstyn, 1987; LaCapra, 1983; Lasch, 1989; White, 1987).