My response to a reply on my earlier Vimy Ridge Day post.
A reader wrote:
“I’ve seen some balanced commentary in the press that did mention the Conscription crisis as part of the nation-creation of WWI, but as you suggest, there is little talk of the British Empire, or of the fact that the “Canadians” who fought at Vimy contained an awful lot of British-born. These themes are well-known to historians, but public commemorations are not about history, they are about memory, the selective kind.”
Here is my reply:
“These themes are well-known to historians, but public commemorations are not about history, they are about memory, the selective kind.”
True, events like this are about the construction of usable pasts by politicians. It seems to me that one of the jobs of historians is to call BS whenever this happens. Margaret Macmillan’s excellent recent book on the uses and abuses of historical analogy is helpful in this regard, but I expect that relatively few copies were sold. It makes me sad that more of the academic history doesn’t filter down into the social memory. It suggests a lack of synchronization between universities, secondary schools, the media, and the general public at the bottom. Perhaps the government should appoint an academic historian as it chief historical officer to pre-check all speeches by dignitaries for questionable interpretations of history. This office would be an extension of the educational functions of the state, much like subsidies for schools, museums, and public television. Our society puts lots of resources into the creation and dissemination of historical knowledge and it is a shame there is so little evidence of this at events like this. One of the problems is that most academic historians in Canada have stopped writing for the general public.
The Past Speaks 