USS Utah
04-08-2013, 01:16 PM
What is a usable past? Societies define themselves by common ideas and historical memories. Historian Henry Steele Commager explained how the founding generations of Americans wrote their own historical narrative. They crafted a heroic past, deliberately stimulating a sense of American nationhood to transcend state and sectional loyalties and bind their brand-new republic together. And they fabricated the new culture with dispatch. “Nothing,” writes Commager, “is more impressive than the speed and the lavishness with which Americans provided themselves with a usable past,” manifest in history, legends, and heroes, not to mention such cultural artifacts as paintings and patriotic ballads. Think about Emanuel Leutze’s painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware -- just one example of cultural adhesive among many.
Sources:
Commager, H. S. (1967). The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Holmes, J. R. (2012). "Yesterday's Lessons or Yesterday's Legends?" Proceedings, Vol. 138/12.
Sources:
Commager, H. S. (1967). The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Holmes, J. R. (2012). "Yesterday's Lessons or Yesterday's Legends?" Proceedings, Vol. 138/12.