OT: Technology, History and Rhetoric [8:20 am]
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person troubled by this new Lincoln museum: Strumming the Mystic Chords of Memory
[T]here is still something serious being undermined. The blurring of history for the sake of entertainment may not be something new. After all, the village of New Salem, about a 20-minute drive from Springfield, was where Lincoln tended store and began his political career, but the town didn’t survive. So in the 1920’s and 30’s, it was “reconstructed”; it is an invented historical village.
But the new museum, because of technological power alone, risks making invention seem like fact. It also enshrines a notion that the best way to know anything about politics and history is to understand personality, and even then only in a simplified fashion. Maybe it will lead to curiosity and further inquiry; maybe not. But it is telling that by the end of the presentation “Ghosts of the Library,” the historian ends up turning into a ghost himself, and disappears into thin air.