Every written, photographed and filmed record is gone. Every museum exhibit has disappeared. Every to-date discovered archaeological site has been replaced by ordinary ground with no remains of any kind.

All news archives, recorded in any form, are gone.

The United Nations sets up an emergency programme to recover as much as possible from living memory. What could you contribute?

The rules: NO web-links (they are GONE). No book references or quotes that you do not know off by heart.

You do not need to detail all you know here, Just outline what you would be able to contribute.

Historical buildings still in use are still here, but all historical inscriptions on them have been erased.

Really?

History is that fucked?

I got nothing.

Shit. We're back to the paleolithic.

Only with nuclear power.

We are on the edge all the time. Unless a sufficient number from the new generation take an interest in the old generation, then history atrophies.

Many Americans don’t know why they speak English. In Canada, many do not realize that Queen Elizabeth is the queen of Canada. In China, Tiananmen Sq is already lost to many young people.

History is tenuous, and can disappear without too much trouble. Much probably already has.

As far as human memory goes, there is no real history. It is dynamic, and always changing, colored by new information, and new beliefs. What is reinforced better survives, but the process of reinforcement means, usually, alteration to some extent.

Well, even with my school knowledge I could write up something reasonably coherent.

A team of professional historians, preferably each with his/her specialised field of knowledge, could, of course, do much better. A problem might be that their reconstructed body of knowledge would lack all original sources, and could, on the one hand, be challenged by any religious or political propagandist; on the other hand, there might be few who are interested in learning about it.

(that's probably all I could contribute)

I don't really know anything beyond a very basic understanding of anything really. I can follow directions so I guess I'd just be an extra set of hands.

There's actually an anime based on this concept. A modern society stripped of it's memories and history. It's called "Big O". Just ignore the giant robots.

I would write a treatise on megalithic sites in Southern England.

I would go to my old history dept and tell 'em to get cracking.

If we're going off of living memory, then we'd have quite a bit between the First World War and the present, but not much else. I'm sure most people, excluding young children, could talk at least a little bit about 9/11 and the War on Terror.

cursuswalker wrote:Every written, photographed and filmed record is gone. Every museum exhibit has disappeared. Every to-date discovered archaeological site has been replaced by ordinary ground with no remains of any kind.

All news archives, recorded in any form, are gone.

The United Nations sets up an emergency programme to recover as much as possible from living memory. What could you contribute?

The rules: NO web-links (they are GONE). No book references or quotes that you do not know off by heart.

You do not need to detail all you know here, Just outline what you would be able to contribute.

I don't see how one can differentiate between, "All of recorded history" and, "All artefacts and documents etc that existed before this moment in time." Historians use just about anything as source material, so 'recorded history' would presumably have to include primary sources such as packaging, newspapers, emails, instruction manuals, forms of transport, clothes, family photos etc.

A better thought experiment would be transposition to another planet where everything is genuinely unconnected to the past, because people are right: The amount of history contained in family photos, fiction literature etc. is actually quite profound. So imagine: the history in your head is all the history of your former planet there will ever be.

What do you know?

I was a history/English major so I know a fair bit of quite general information, especially about Western Europe, focusing on England and Canada. I also have some knowledge about the evolution of the human species and our development, I also know something about the History of Science but the rest of my history knowledge is either based on major events or social. My military history before 1900 is very poor.

What is also lacking from my knowledge is chronology. I would be hard pressed to remember dates and I might struggle to set things in the right chronological order, even, unless they were directly related.

Teshi wrote:A better thought experiment would be transposition to another planet where everything is genuinely unconnected to the past, because people are right: The amount of history contained in family photos, fiction literature etc. is actually quite profound. So imagine: the history in your head is all the history of your former planet there will ever be.

What do you know?

I was a history/English major so I know a fair bit of quite general information, especially about Western Europe, focusing on England and Canada. I also have some knowledge about the evolution of the human species and our development, I also know something about the History of Science but the rest of my history knowledge is either based on major events or social. My military history before 1900 is very poor.

What is also lacking from my knowledge is chronology. I would be hard pressed to remember dates and I might struggle to set things in the right chronological order, even, unless they were directly related.

That's the kind of stuff!

It fascinates me to think what kind of documented history could be recreated just from memory.

History is one of those things that people seem to EXPECT people to be interested in, and anyone who doesn't know the basics is an idiot.Why?

HAJiME wrote:History is one of those things that people seem to EXPECT people to be interested in, and anyone who doesn't know the basics is an idiot.Why?

I reckon most people are interested in at least some aspects of history, even if not the kind of history they get taught in school. Family history, for instance, is very popular, and it gives people some kind of purchase on the bigger picture (see any episode of 'Who Do You Think You Are?' for instances of this). The kinds of oral histories gathered by researchers like Studs Terkel are endlessly fascinating and useful, although they contain hardly any of the paraphernalia of 'official' history.

I was once interviewed by Sarfraz Manzoor for an article he was writing on popular culture and politics in the 1970s, and he asked me what my feelings were about that time. This was actually quite a difficult question to answer, so I rambled a lot. But what struck me later was how difficult it had been to disentangle my genuine recollections of the 1970s from all the baggage that the decade has accumulated. There are so many iconic images from the 1970s that spring to mind, so many political/cultural etc reference points, plus countless lazy generalisations, that I genuinely couldn't quickly formulate a reasonable response: I had to talk it through at length. In some senses, if I was asked to construct a personal history based purely on memory, it would be much less tainted than the one I currently carry around, but it would also be lacking the kinds of contextual detail that would give it coherence. Being able to draw on the sorts of testimonies and evidence contained in the historical record allows us to place ourselves more securely in the world. My experiences in the punk circuit, for instance, make a lot more sense when viewed in the light of things such as Paris '68, the rise of youth subcultures following World War Two, the collapse of the post-war political consensus etc. 'Being there' can be enormously exhilarating, but it doesn't necessarily produce a truthful account.

There I go, rambling again.

I once wrote a paper comparing two contemporary diary accounts of major events (The Great Plague and the French Revolution) with fictional accounts written later (but as if they were occurring in the present).

I mention this because what you're saying about the 1970s and the iconic moments reminded me of this. Our understanding of the shape of history, especially but not exclusively as observers, is different from the shape of events as they occur. When we record these events we do two things: we set ourselves apart from the events as survivors (mentally, physically, whatever) and we reshape events so the truly important moments grow and the insignificant events shrink regardless of how they felt at the time. What to one participant may have felt was the beginning of everything may actually turn out to be a lot of paper trumpets.