Is history just there to amuse us? Flickr/Elliott Brown. Some rights reserved.
Waterloo? Yes, I remember it well, not the actual battle but the museum. I thought it would prove apocryphal, but there really was on display an English newspaper with the headline Corsican Uprising Defeated. Some things never change. Yet, if we truly remember past things, we remember them because they were so different. Waterloo was perhaps the last great world event before technology could record how things looked. A midshipman sketched Napoleon on deck before he sailed to St Helena. Otherwise it was personal recollections, David’s idealized portraits and Madame Tussaud’s waxwork. That was all that was available. Waterloo signified not only the end of an international war and the restoration of the propertied classes in Europe. It marked the end of human memory as the arbiter of history. Thereafter history was to be written by electricity. Technology would conquer every wilderness and cross every continent.
Endless commemoration
Technology by making everything available and immediate has made nonsense of history. People now often find it difficult to imagine the world as it was. Museums theme exhibits so that the experience is not left to our personal intellect and imagination. It is presented to us as spectacle. It is history as entertainment, a selective recollection spoon fed to us. The past is no longer another country. It is no longer the record of events in times past. It is something immediate and available as a participatory experience, a highly selective nostalgia.
