Memory or History?

What precisely is history? I said once that “history comes from the archive,” but to understand the implications of that, I should define the word history. I have addressed archives in a different article. But history is the constant reworking of memories embodied within the archive.

It is a method, rather than a series of events set in stone. Both the public and historians know this. Historians have known this for over a century, and the public became aware during the mid-twentieth century, broadly speaking. History is always shifting with the resources available to the historian.

Memories are quite different from history. Memories are written into the fabric of things, people, and places but are made accessible through people and social structures. History is the broad scope of all that may have happened in the past; in a manner of speaking, it is a collection of all possible memories.

What are memories, then? They are stories, possibilities attached to things. It is by the narrowing of these possibilities that history becomes apparent. Historians access history through memory. Memories themselves are not things, though; they are meanings attached to things. Because these…