Constitutional Conventions
Public history should make us thinkIn East Berlin, the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism was a big attraction. Soviet-bloc tourists mobbed it, and by the mid-1980s visitors also included jittery NATO-country citizens on day-pass jaunts over the famous wall. Built as the New Guard House of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the Memorial had neoclassical, Doric-style columns under a low-peaked pediment. Within its echoing dimness, a clear prismatic block, Soviet-moderne, fragmented an eternal flame.
The draw was the changing of the guard out front. Orders were shrieked as young soldiers goose-stepped through a routine. You might see two of them, seemingly identical under their helmets, crack a surreptitious joke as one presented arms to the other. The crowd, nearly silent only moments before, surged abruptly toward the stamping boots to get a better look, while a line of police, as young and ostentatiously armed as the guards, swung truncheons, yelled, pushed the crowd back with viciously barking dogs. People in the crowd laughed, fell back, pushed forward.
The Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism gave chilling summation to the totalitarianism that had created it, in part because of its outrageous contradiction—claiming to condemn historic evils while making a triumphant display of them—and even more profoundly because the contradiction didn’t seem to be on anybody’s mind.
In a real democratic republic, where the whole people is supposed to be required to think, a different kind of public history is needed—lively and accessible, yet able to inspire without falsifying and to encourage consideration along with awe. So it is a deeply unhappy irony that the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which since 2003 has celebrated on a grand scale our founding moment and enduring national law, obliterates dissent and pushes foregone and even false conclusions on its visitors. Undermining its own insistence on the importance of democracy to the United States, the Constitution Center reveals how readily public curators, however well-meaning, may seek to control rather than foster thought.
This article has become a book!
Inventing American History
William Hogeland
Cloth / April 2009
“For William Hogeland, thinking about history is an act of moral inquiry and high citizenship. A searching and original voice.” — Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland
American public history—in magazines and books, television documentaries and museums—tends to celebrate its subject at all costs. This does us a great disservice, argues William Hogeland. Looking at details glossed over in three examples of public history—the Alexander Hamilton revival, tributes to Pete Seeger and William F. Buckley, and the Constitution Center in Philadelphia—Hogeland considers what we lose when history is written to conform to political aims.
Instead Hogeland calls for a public history grounded in the gritty events of the day. Only by embracing history’s contradictions and difficulties, he argues, will we be able to learn from it.
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About the Author
William Hogeland is author of The Whiskey Rebellion and Inventing American History, forthcoming.
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Sanford Levinson’s critique of this article, History Matters, but So Does Politics and William Hogeland’s response
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Inventing Alexander Hamilton
BR Footnote:
Boston Review’s intern blog