What is the importance of memories in history writing?
Answers
Though many historians argued that the meaning people make from events is just as important aswhat actually happened. Humanities scholars are interested in the significance of how and what people remember, even when memory is sometimes unconsciously flawed, or in cases where people have different or conflicting memories of the same event. What seems to matter most ishow events and their consequences have impacted personal individual or collective lives. Even if individual memory or family memory do not feature real historical facts and characters, they present accounts that capture a historical period and context, and inscribe a memory of the pastin the narrative. Often, individual memory is part of the collective memory.Memory when recording history is important because it gives history a flow and an emotionalmeaning and knowledge that you just cannot get from most basic historical documents. Mankindhas regularly witnessed the massive destruction created by natural disasters. Similarlydestructive to human life are man-made atrocities, like war, genocide and revolution. For example if we are interested in Holocaust study we can find a lot of stories told by the survivors.But beyond this family history, it is the collective history of the Jewish people passed throughthe most scaring period of the 20
th
century.Remembering historical acts of domination such as colonialism or political violence cantherefore, have a range of affective consequences on the individual and social consciousness,from trauma to shame to anger to cathartic self-recognition. Major events in history such as periods of colonization might be considered a catastrophe by those who are being colonized.Remembering a period of colonization allows societies to better understand the present andcontemplate the future.