When does history "stop" being relevant? Is "cultural heritage" okay for some groups and not others?

[SoCalDem]

Code words, all.

History is defined as:

http://www.articlesbase.com/college-and-university-articles/definitions-of-history-236921.html
The term ‘history’ is derived from the Greek word ‘historia’ which means ‘information’ or ‘an enquiry designed to elicit truth’. It is just “man — his story” — the story of efforts to satisfy his craving for an orderly social life.
History has been defined by different scholars in different connotations. Though the words and languages used often are different in character, but, the implications are not so different fundamentally.
According to the earliest definition of Aristotle, “History is an account of the unchanging past.”

According to Reniev, history can be termed as a study which is concerned with the human past.
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E. H. Carr gives a very beautiful definition of history. He says — history is an unending dialogue between the past and the present.
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There is no universally agreed definition of history. It has been defined differently by different historians.

Burckhardt said, “History is the record of what one ages finds worthy of note in another.
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According to H. G. Wells, “Human history is in essence a history of ideas.”
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Marc Bloch thinks that history is the science of men in time.
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According to Freud, “Historical records are a law of right and wrong.”
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Henry Johnson gives the view that history is a detailed account of the events that have taken place.
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Dr. Radhakrishnan says, “History is the memory of a nation or a race.”

The best definition which is scientific to a great extent, was given by Rapson. According to him, “History is a connected account of the course of events of progress of ideas.”

Of course we all know who "writes down" the history. The "winners", and the ones with the money to promote & publish write the history. Over time, "new" versions of old events encroach on the old histories, but once written down, they all persist, side-by-side, just waiting for the devotees of any and all versions to choose which one to believe.

Some histories end up cloaked by careful editing, and others explode onto the scene, full of revelatory details that no one seems to have known about until then.

Every time a famous person dies, or some current event tweaks our collective memories, historical data flows like water, over a cliff.

Living an a cable-news-24/7 world, we often forget that there was a time, when contemporaneous reporting was written down, and stored away. It's still there, if we look for it, but it's often easier to "listen" to today's storytellers as they "fill us in" on background material.

Public education has done a pretty poor job in recent years, so it's entirely possible these days for a LARGE segment of our population to have "learned" history from what they see on The History Channel or from so-called historical novels.






CULTURE...SOME DEFINITIONS

http://www.tamu.edu/classes/cosc/choudhury/culture.html

* Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

* Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.

* Culture is communication, communication is culture.

* Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.

* A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

* Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.

* Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.

* Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.

* Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

Using politics as the prism, it's easy to see why there are such vast differences at play. Reagan's passing was perfectly okay to one set of culture watchers, and yet abhorred by another. A LOT of the history of the man was/IS still cloaked from sight, so perhaps some of the devotees might have had a different opinion, had they had more access..but perhaps not.

The culture of the right has always always considered themselves as the one true culture, hence the term "counter-culture" was used for anyone daring to question their wisdom. Many of the people on the right, see displaying of their "cultural heritage", as somehow God-given, and justly deserved of continued reverence, even though time has proven many, if not most of them as being hollow, mean-spirited and sometimes just plain evil, in their own vernacular. The appearance of the "stars & bars", back in the public arena just at the same time as civil rights were being won for the dispossessed, is one glaring example.

When someone on the left dies, they are always measured against their flaws, their mis-steps, and are praised as being a great person, "even though they did x or y, back in <date here>...cue the tape...."

The culture & history of the person passing, or of the group they belonged to is somehow treated as if it began and ended with them, instead of them being but one step in the continuum of the total history that made them who they became, and how it will reflect on the ones who follow.

The right understands this and hangs on to their "culture, heritage, & history", for dear life. they love it so much they are always polishing it, tweaking it, and enhancing it. We people on the left are too ready sometimes, to jettison our past, and in doing so, overlook a lot of events, people and happenings that we should be embracing, if for no other reason, than to explain to ourselves why we are so accommodating to injustices done us.

Unions are in our culture,history, heritage, and we seem poised to look away, again.

Health care reform has been in our culture, history & heritage, and we are poised to have it reduced to a paltry compromise that will only nibble at the edges, and do little to change things.

Education is in our culture, history and heritage. But for democrats & progressives, the public school system would never have happened, and yet we have kids all over the country who will start school without books, in schools that are sub-standard

We need to reclaim OUR culture, heritage & history, and start building on it, instead of allowing it to be chipped away, as if it did not matter.

[Terry in Austin]

1. Added to the list of history definitions

"One damned thing after another."

Variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Ford. It's true that history consists, in part, of a collection of facts and events -- just one damned thing after another -- the same way science or law start with an assortment of facts.

The job of the scientist or prosecuting attorney, then, is to weave the facts together in a narrative that explains them. In a real sense, the scientist and the lawyer are storytellers, though each is constrained to tell the story in a systematic way according their respective disciplines.

History doesn't have a real counterpart to those systems, although historians like Toynbee and Spengler have taken a stab at it. For the most part, history is pure narrative, with its explanatory value mostly due to the values, sensibilities and predilections of the listeners. In that respect, it has a lot in common with cultural narrative. It's hard to know, in fact, where history leaves off and cultural narrative begins.

Most likely, it will stay that way until history as a study finds some kind of systematic paradigm like scientific method or "legal method." Who knows if that will ever happen? If it does, that will leave cultural narrative to be the essentially political brawl that it always has been!

[AuntPatsy]

2. This was very interesting...sad that it fell so far..

[SoCalDem]

3. Thanks for the CPR

:rofl:

often, things that are intended to provoke thought, get lost in the "scuffle"..and of course, events take over as well :)

as you may have gathered, this came about because of the "Black Irish" thread, and the surprising responses from some, who apparently thought that "what happened in the past" was somehow irrelevant if it did not actually happen to the "new" Kennedys..

and of course we see it too, in the response to African-Americans who are supposed to just "forgive & forget", now that they too, have "arrived".

the people who seem to be pushing this agenda, of course are perfectly justified in believing that re-enacting the Civil War and rewriting their own heritage is somehow "normal"....everyone ELSE must jettison their past, as a possible reason for some of their current beliefs..:)