For the last year, we’ve been asking the experts at MOHAI to provide us with background information on a variety of everyday topics, from the worst winter weather and most popular mayor, to the origins of Seattle’s top hobbies: bicycling, beer and baseball. We’ve learned a lot about the history of our city through our regular “Ask MOHAI” feature, but all this talk of the past has made us think, What is history anyway? We turned to MOHAI’s Helen Divjak, manager of programs and community engagement, to find out.
I hate to disappoint, but it is virtually impossible for me to define history neatly and concisely. Is history what “actually” happened or what people remember happening? Is it a factual record of the past, or a representation of the past, propped up by facts? One can turn to the dictionary for an authoritative answer, but even the Oxford English Dictionary – the king of all dictionaries – defines history in a manner that leaves something to be desired. That’s because history, in my humble opinion, is elusive. How it is defined changes from context to context and from person to person. Which brings me to my one certainty: history is subjective.
Our understanding of the past changes according to individual experiences, as well as the social, economic, political and cultural contexts in which we have those experiences. For example, the way we think about the Civil War today, 150 years after the fact, is fundamentally different than the way in which historians thought about the same war in 1911. The way my parents understand the Vietnam War is fundamentally different from what I learned about the same war as their daughter and as high school student. Moreover, how I perceive September 11th as an historical event, is fundamentally different from what children will be learning about that same event twenty, fifty or one hundred years from now. Does this mean that one history is better or more accurate than then next? Not necessarily. Rather, these multiple versions of history are a testament to the fact that humans are complex, and so too is our story.
Yet, in a quest to better define history and its meaning to contemporary Seattleites, MOHAI launched a new film competition in the summer of 2010, the History Is___ film competition. The competition charged filmmakers of all ages and skill levels to pick up a camera and make a short film of five minutes or less that explored the theme of history. Our goal was not to dictate what we, the Museum of History & Industry, ordained as history, but rather to inspire our community members to contemplate what history means on a personal, familial, and community level. Equally important, we wanted to empower the public to take charge of its history; to take some responsibility in how history is written, re-written, preserved and shared. After all, if we leave it to the scholars, the media, and the elite to record history for us, how can we be sure that our own stories will be preserved for future generations?
The competition brought in over 40 short films that expressed remarkably different perspectives on the past, present and future. Responses varied from “History Is Us”, an animated piece that attempts to recount all of western history in just five minutes, to “History Is Unwritten”, a beautiful film narrated in Lushootseed, the native language of our region of the Pacific Northwest.
MOHAI plans to continue this competition in the coming years, leading up to the museum’s grand opening at our new facility in the fall of 2012. But in the meantime, we want to hear from you. Tell us, what do you think history is?
To watch more History Is___ films, go to MOHAI’s You Tube channel and click on the History Is___ playlist, or visit the next History Café, hosted each third Thursday of the month at Roy Street Coffee from 7-8pm. To find out how you can enter your own film in the 2011-2012 History Is___ film competition, check the competition’s website this summer.
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