I want to remember this class forever. It was inspirational to listen to my classmates over the semester, to hear their tales from the field as we each figured out what the heck our projects would be about and how we were going to master (as much as possible) the art of the interview that yields vivid and meaningful stories out of narrators–those we interview–and then compose those somehow into an appropriate historical synthesis.

Not every college class is composed of such a diverse, engaged, and interesting crowd–not even in grad school. We had some of the best discussions in that class that I’ve had in my entire college career (of six years…). Today my friend Seth (an undergrad–the class is cross-listed) remarked that this was his favorite class in all of college.

I am under no illusions that anyone else will care to read about what each of my classmates did for their projects, but I need to write them down so that in a few years I won’t have forgotten this extraordinary body of work that we produced this fall, in a matter of weeks and months, in this year 2011. Listening to the clips in class, of the people we’d been hearing about all semester made for a remarkable week of class presentations. Also stellar to hear about the dirty details of trying to get people (sometimes relatives, sometimes strangers, some in between these) to talk to us, college kids out seeking a good story to contribute to historical narrative.

Jessie: I interviewed two women who are the mothers of girls adopted from China. I explored the notions of family, roots, identity, cross-cultural families, siblings, and the trials of the adoptions process–including public and private perception from family members, friends, and outsiders. I had wonderful experiences and learned so much. I will chronicle some of my own stories and lessons here soon. I will also share some of the most remarkable clips, details, and stories in audio form, so you can hear these women tell their own stories.

Chris: He interviewed three immigrant rights activists (one of them his wife) who had some live-defining experiences during the immigration drama that occurred in Arizona in 2009 and 2010, with SB 1070. Young people, a recent event, and powerful, emotional stories.

Aaron: Interviewed a WWII veteran who hadn’t planned on joining the military, but was drafted in the last month of the war. He wound up being a career soldier, the war truly changing the course of his entire life. He found this guy through another girl in the class, actually, after expressing his interest in doing something relating to WWII. This was an unexpectedly interesting story, because really, what new stories can you tell these days on the second world war?

Joleen: She focused on one elementary school in a county south of Atlanta, and sought the perspectives of teachers at the school who have seen the demographics of the school diversify enormously over the past ten years.

Liz: She delved into some perspectives of residents of her home county on what is considered the last lynching ever to occur in the South, in the 1950s, which happened in that county.

Denise: She interviewed four women who were leaders in the Georgia quilt documentation project that took place from 1989 to 1993 across the state. Her larger goal was to use these interviews to help her design her own documentation project to be expanded for her capstone project for the heritage preservation program (the same program I’m in). She wound up finding some heartfelt stories beyond the cut-and-dry facts of the documentation process itself.

Brooks: He interviewed his grandfather–from Savannah–about his career as a Georgia state legislator during the 1960s. He was elected in 1966, precisely because of the ending of the County Unit System, a unique and stunning old Georgia political structure that ensured that real political power remained with the rural parts of the state, even as larger and larger portions of the population resided in cities.

James: Interviewed three people who know or used to know the author Alice Walker, who is from Eatonton, Georgia–two classmates and her niece. He sought to define the person that is Alice Walker from a number of angles.

Michelle: She focused on her grandmother, a retired educator of more than 35 years, who was a black teacher at risk of losing her job when integration meant fewer teachers were needed.

Classmate X (Can you believe there is one girl whose name I don’t know?): Another school integration story, this time focused on people who went through the Marietta City school system during desegregation and who now teach in the same system. This was my least favorite of them all, just really oft-heard stuff, and I swear it is not because I have somehow predisposed to not like it just because I also cannot recall her name.

Danny: Interviewed three generations of his wife’s family, who own a farm in Yatesville, Georgia (population under 400), on the trials, memories, and questionable and perceived dark future of the farm and farming at large in the state and the United States.

Seth: He interviewed a personal hero and former boss, Anita Beatty, controversial advocate for the homeless and leader of the Atlanta Task Force–on which Seth spent four or five years working towards improving the lives of homeless in the city. He battled with the process, seeking the complicated private view of Anita, rather than the oft-seen and politicized public version she has so perfectly mastered.

Rosemary: Interviewed members of two families that have connection to the land that is now Arabia Mountain Heritage Area, people who were coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s, when the outskirts of the city were becoming part of the burgeoning metropolitan area.

Rebecca: Interviewed her grandmother, matriarch to her enormous North Carolina family, and strong woman head of household who ran a farm and raised dozens of children of the family over the years. Her grandmother is a pistol, for sure.

Laura: Took a journey into the histories of Commercial High School, Girls’ High, and the numerous incarnations the buildings have been since the early twentieth century. Her aunt was a student in Commercial High School, which sparked her interest, among other things–including her decades of work herself in education and as a school principal.

Last and most amazing:

Brenda: Since Brenda is a stage actor and filmmaker by training and profession as well, she used the oral history class for her own skilled perspective, and her final project reflected a creative and talented woman and a powerful story. She used clips of two women, her mother and another old friend, who are both–in different ways–part of a group of Hawaiian immigrants in the Augusta, Georgia and Aiken, South Carolina areas (through their husbands). Her own mother married a Japanese Hawaiian man, and the other woman, Millie, is Hawaiian and married a white man. Their quite distinct perspectives, when played side by side like conversation, brought out the similarities and the “Hawaiian Spirit” and tides of life that both have experienced, with Hawaiian cultural influences and as women in interracial marriages who moved to the South at a time when there were barely any people other than black and white. She made these into a film using footage of herself playing ukulele and photos of the people being mentioned and speaking. It was an apt use of her audio, fitting her own quirky style; and the story came across so powerful in this medium. Her 4-minute piece was inspiring. I was crying at her skills, at the power of these voices, at the potential we each have in us to tell a great story.

Laura also had some excellent summative comments on oral history, when she presented her process and conclusion. One is that humility, and in this, not always knowing what your goal is, can sometimes make for the most effective oral history interviews, because you are truly allowing the narrator to guide the meaning, and where it goes. You, the interviewer, are not trying to make them fit in some construct to fit your own assumptions or research goals.

Indeed, we all learned from our projects that we cannot assume to find anything, and we cannot expect to be able to form the project, the stories, into something we either anticipate or desire. We cannot possibly know the stories in store for us when that recorder starts rolling. I did other oral histories this semester for another class’s research, and so I was doing quite a few of these meetings, every one of them with someone I had either just met or had never met at all. Driving to each one, I felt that jolt, the excitement of not knowing what in the world I would learn in the next ninety minutes.

Who knows, anyone, until we ask to hear?

We’ll call this the requisite commentary-on-the-anniversary blog. Probably every American is reflecting on that Tuesday, September 11 ten years ago, in their own way, to many different degrees of emotion and disconnection, both and neither at once. It has been a decade, and what made it perhaps most poignant was a story posted on Public Radio International’s website, on the difficulty of teaching 9/11 in high schools now that so many kids who are in high school recall the event only in vague and foggy ways–if at all.

The story tells of the teachers interviewed for the piece and their experience year by year: how in the years just afterwards, classroom discussions “were much more visceral.” The 4- to 7- year olds mentioned in the story, who are in high school today, remember reactions of their parents and other very responses very near to them, but not the same way many who are older (adults, now, like me) remember the images on TV clearly–even if, as in my case, I didn’t see them until I got home from school. (At the middle school where I was attending eighth grade at the time, someone higher up made the decision not to tell any of the students what was going on. By lunchtime, teachers around us were in tears and we all detected something was not right. I went home on the bus that day knowing only that “someone had bombed the Pentagon.” For real)

Looks like it’s history, now, really and truly. I remember in the wake of the tragedy, people saying this would be the moment for my generation that would long be recounted as a universal American experience. The endless and epic tale we each, we all, have. Where You Were When It Happened, much like President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. But really, here it is, a whole decade later, and it has become a part of history, and event that marks a clear delineation in this nation’s history: a Before and an After. Strange to be at a stage, in adulthood, where things I experienced are “history.” Guess this is what growing up feels like, right?

There was another truly interesting–and also disturbing and crazy and wholly logical given the world we live in today–report on the ten-year-later mark in this world: on the technology of facial recognition, and its birth in the government funding that allowed its remarkable development in the post-9/11 scared, reactionary, and technology and internet-savvy environment. NPR’s Marketplace had a segment on the stunning course it has taken, as two enormous events dovetailed in history:

Fred Cate is a law professor and privacy guru at Indiana University. He says after 9/11, two independent trends dovetailed and reinforced each other. The federal government was investing hundreds of millions in surveillance technology and research to try and keep us safer. And companies like Google and Facebook were remaking the digital landscape. There was a data-collecting revolution.

FRED CATE: 9/11 and the sort of huge growth in social networking and in profiling and collecting Internet traffic — those events are really parallel with each other.

And Cate says:

FRED CATE: We have gotten more used to more surveillance. And it’s not clear that that’s just attributable to the events of 9/11. But particularly when you think of the types of security we all go through now — would have been pretty close to unthinkable a decade ago.

What we have created, as the story reports, is technology that fairly easily recognizes your face and identifies you based on photos it draws from the internet, and several other features both amazing and scary at once. The creepiest part: new technology can actually take a stab at what your social security number is, if it can determine from internet sources where you were born. Rest easy, though, because this stuff isn’t on the market, and there are no intentions by its creators to put it there. As it stands, as I understood anyway, is that this is for governmental purposes. (You can decide if that makes you feel better about this.)

How interesting to think our post-9/11 perspective has provided the incubator for things like this, and our Facebook pages have fueled the flames, made it all the more possible. We are willing participants, at some degree, of the worlds we create. Ten years later, look at us now. To be honest, I have little memory of what adult life was like, even in a purely observational point of view as mine was, prior to 2001. And now it’s a part of our past. Huh.

Americans don’t tend to see the past in their everyday lives. If they do, it might be because of a personal or ethnic connection, or maybe they hear the president harken back to Sputnik and the Space Race, and greatness of our past. But the average person tends not to feel overly connected to their area’s past, nor do they see how history could be valuable in their own lives. Disengagement, you might call it. We have, after all, spent our existence as a nation on a purposeful mission to be constantly reinventing ourselves, getting away from the demons that held down the European ancestors of those early settlers (and with the notion that we were claiming empty land, preordained for us, but that’s beside this point). No time for the past.

In an excellent essay (in this book), public historian Michael Frisch talks about this relationship we have with history, using his 1980s perspective to talk about the Vietnam War in our national memory. First, talking about the war was out of bounds because it was current, still present. Then, you couldn’t look at the war or its roots because it was the past, an episode that needed to be “put behind us.” But what happens then, he points out, is that while we have the living memories, those memories themselves get warbled, people block things out, or chose not to remember. Even films about the war, while providing heroic characters for audiences and poignant stories, keep these figures pointedly isolated from the history of the event, from what it means historically. This puts us at a disadvantage in analyzing our past.

I don’t have an answer, nor even a suggestion, about the state of this relationship, or about possible implementations to bring the two, American and American history, closer together. I do hope that some of the projects I want to work on help to bring people closer to their past in ways that are meaningful for their present, for the daily lives now.

Frisch quotes a Nigerian friend who has this to say about Americans and our disconnection from what’s behind us:

“What’s so mysterious?” he observed.

“Why bother with history when you’re rich and powerful? All it can do is tell you how you climbed to the top, which is a story its probably best not to examine too closely. No, you don’t need history. What you need is something more like a pretty carpet that can be rolled out on ceremonial occasions to cover all those bloodstains on the stairs. And, in fact, that’s what you usually get from your historians.”

Then he went on solemnly:

“For the rest of us, its a lot different. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring history. History is a giant stone that lies on top of us; for us, history is something we have to struggle to get out from under.”

To say that most of American history has been seen through the eyes of the powerful is a familiar criticism, but we rarely acknowledge, as my friend suggests, how profoundly power, privilege, and freedom from historical constraint have conditioned our basic relation to the past.

There was a sense of liberation from the toils of the European past that early Americans felt, and to a large extent, we still run from it today. It is hard to think about bad things in our history. But it is obtuse to ignore them and never face unpleasant truths or critical interpretations of what happened before us (or, more difficultly, during our lifetimes). Taking a deep, contemplative look at the American past does not make anyone unpatriotic. That bloody stairway we climbed? We better know it well, for all its good and bad.

Walt and Mickey Mouse, watching over the Magic Kingdom in Disney World

Mike Wallace’s Mickey Mouse History: And Other Essays on American Memory earns its title from the chapter on Walt Disney’s and, later, Disney Enterprises, Inc.’s interpretation and execution of the historical narrative, in “Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World.” Walt Disney’s approach to the history that appears in the Magic Kingdom echoed the historical interpretations of the consensus-inspired 1950s, but translated into a theme park, took an extreme step further for the sake it tidying up the past for visitors. Says Wallace, his “approach to the past was… not to reproduce it, but to improve it.” The excuse, that it’s only a theme park, not a museum, hides below the fact that many may never know the difference. People who take in the past via a Disney presentation file this away in their brain as part of history and as a bit of knowledge to recall later, promulgating  misinformation, and making it harder for people to accept more accurate histories when they are confronted with them.

Disney's famous audioanimatronics, here inside EPCOT's Spaceship Earth ride, which recounts a version of the "history of communication and technology."

EPCOT has an array of complications all its own in terms of historic interpretation, being–as it has long been–backed by corporate sponsors who at their best explore the challenges and triumphs of a world that is ever marching forward and improving technologically, and at its worst, ignoring the fact that man’s technology has not always had positive impacts on the progression of mankind. (And it would, of course, never be the corporation’s fault; they would instead be the ones seeking to find solutions to problems). Each pavilion stands as a tribute to technology and the future, as a permanent World’s Fair. Then across the waters lies the World Showcase, where countries’ marketable goods are for sale and each destination has been designed to demonstrate the distinct features of its culture.

As Wallace points out, “all historical interpretations [done by Disney Enterprises] are necessarily selective in their facts, but [in EPCOT] the silences are more profoundly distorting. Consider, for example, that in all EPCOT’s depictions of the past as a continuous expansion of man’s possibilities through technology, there is not a word about war. Nothing about the critical impetus it provided through ages to scientific development, nor about the phenomenal destruction such “development” wrought.”

Two other things struck me about the interpretation of the past that we find all around us in a Disney park. First, it presents history as unidirectional, that in fact there was no point that the trajectory could have taken another path. “There were never any forks on the path of Progress,” he writes, “never any sharp political struggles over which way to go.” The other fault in the clean, unoffensive, and vacation-ready historic package is that it makes the past into a “pleasantly nostalgic memory, now so completely transcended by the modern corporate order as to be irrelevant to contemporary life.” We can consume the stories so long as they entertain us, and move on to the next thing. “This diminishes our capacity to make sense of our world through understanding how it came to be,” says Wallace.

When the only versions of history people encounter are commodities–theme parks, but also docudramas, Hollywood movies, and even historic fiction–I fear it becomes the norm for them, deepening the chasm between people and their pasts and their understanding of the world. This seems to be OK for people when they can draw intelligent conclusions and have a grounded base of knowledge, but it can by no means be ignored as an insignificant influence on a people’s vision of their history, in the midst of a thousand museums that don’t draw nearly as many visitors.

For me it is something to ponder on a personal level as well, because, while I can dig through the cleanliness and disregard the stereotypes in the narratives, I highly doubt that is the mental lens that everyone else brings with them to Disney World. And on the other hand, I love the magic of Disney World. Far beyond the history that entrenches it, there is the imagination, the dazzling effects and the ability it has to transport you into another world–not to mention, back a little bit into your childhood. It is a place I will surely take my children someday, although what I do with the historic interpretations and how I explain them might be a little different than the approach others take.

One of my most favorite Disney pairs: Mary Poppins and Burt.

As the title of this entry implies, there has been ongoing debate–sometimes heated–over whether or not we should have dropped the atom bomb on two Japanese cities, whether it would have truly ended the war, or whether, once it did, if it was the only way. (I recommend watching The Fog Of War, the interview-style documentary of Robert McNamara’s reflections on his time as Secretary of Defense during several important conflicts of American involvement, and especially his reflections on the Americans in Japan in WWII.)

I am not here to discuss the answer, nor do I think there is one. We cannot weigh the value of human life in any other way than by determining who is closest to us (therefore determining who we would wish to save), meaning that we chose those people before strangers; likewise, the strangers would leave us to die before they saw family and friends perish. And so, there will always be the Japanese side, and the American side. The ones who lost everything on those two August days, and the ones who were saved for their families at home. It is a terrible, moral, human dilemma. It does not go away with time, but rather, remains in the consciences of those children and survivors who either thank God for the bomb, or condemn it as the day their life was doomed with a dark, looming cloud.

I do not mean to write of despair, or entrench you in a sad story with no resolution (although that is what it is); but we must be mindful of the fact, the tragic fact, that on the day thousands of American troops were spared, upwards of one hundred thousand people in Hiroshima alone were killed. It was a time of war, certainly, but some children lost their entire families, and some families were extinguished entirely. I heard one story recently, from a woman who was seven when her parents and all her sisters were killed by the bomb over Hiroshima, and she tells how the cries of her dying sisters still haunt her, and that she has rarely felt happy in her entire life. Her life. She’s in her eighties now, and that’s a lifetime of tragedy that follows her. When this subject comes up, I am always struck by that idea that while my countrymen survived, people on the other side of the world lost their entire lives.

I can’t imagine what it must be like for American soldiers, or any of the people, who have lived through the atrocities of war, who have seen it firsthand and experienced it from any side– be it that of victim, perpetrator, defender, or anything else. I could never condemn it, for it protects my life. But sometimes, I am so heartbroken by its effects on all parties involved, I can hardly bear it. There is no “right” side, and there is no solution, and that is the most depressing part. But we march forward, hoping that at least we can keep the stories of both sides alive so that we can preserve those histories–those of both sides, of the humanity of each person–to the best of our ability.

(Listen to some of the stories of atomic bomb survivors here, recorded in 2005 for NPR.)

P.S. Some historians are rethinking the role of the Soviet Union in the Japanese surrender, giving it more credit than in the past for ending the war in the Pacific theater. For that article, see here.)

Bridgette McGee-Robinson with an image of her grandfather, Willie McGee (Photo via Teri Havens, NRP.org)

Ms. McGee-Robinson has by no means proven any new facts beyond all doubt. But as she reports, that was not her intention. What lied within this journey of discovery for her was a means through which to better understand what happened to her grandfather, and how best to see him in her own eyes. Ancestry is obviously important to each family in its own way, and comes with its own asteriskses and exceptions, oddities and inaccuracies, emotions and upsets. And at then end of the day, there will never be a definitive hard-fact truth to the matter, nor, usually, will any families receive the historical recognition they feel their ancestors are due. But stories like Willie McGee’s, told through the eyes of his granddaughter, take this beef out of the equation entirely. It becomes much more than a little research on the lives contained in one family tree; it touches on the living memory of  a city and on the racial flares that still erupt when we question a white woman and a black man romantically involved in the 1950s American South. It suddenly makes family histories, or at least this one, seem much more relevant than they had before to the larger historical narrative, and in a very good way. In a sense, it validates the arguments made for studying ancestry, while also explicitly pointing to the inevitable discrepancies and distortions of time and memory.

By the end of this radio segment, I was in tears; I couldn’t believe the power this poignant story, and its development, had on me on that Friday afternoon, while I was set and ready to take to the road. As someone who has spent time preparing both historical and journalistic writing, I appreciate all the more the utterly nuanced elevation the piece contained, building until there was no way to turn it off; when you’re writing for an audience, a story like the one she has is both coveted and exceedingly rare.

Listen to the entire radio diary here; it is worth the 23-minute investment, I promise. I would not dub this one of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard if I was not serious.