THE RURAL HISTORY & CULTURE ASSOCIATION
OF SASKATCHEWAN

Twitter, which could be described as a abbreviated version of Facebook, is being used by a number of people to promote interest in some historic documents like diaries.  Twitter, like Facebook, is a social networking site.  It permits users to write 140 character updates on what they are doing,  in a manner similar to the Wall feature on Facebook.  It is a hosted service and users can send new entries to their sections or other users through website  texting and get updates the same way.  People can follow others and get all their entries.  The shortness of the entries and Twitter’s quickness makes it similar to instant messaging, but all messages are public.  Several people have started using Twitter in other ways besides traditional social networking and of particular interest to historians are a few people who have been using Twitter to essentially serialize diaries.   A blog entitled The Social Path recently wrote about this practice and its value.    The serialization of 1937 diary has recently attracted as many as 1800 regular viewers, which provides an example of the potential power of the new media to bring history to popular audiences.

The Home Page of the History News Network

If you are wondering what direction the study of history may be going, the History Department at George Mason University is a great place to start looking.  Located in Fairfax, Virginia, the George Mason University is the home of the Center for History and the New Media.  New media is largely the internet, and while some historians still turn up their noses at the internet, at George Mason University historians are using the internet to advance the study of history in new and exciting directions.

Ph.D. candidates in history at George Mason are actually required to take a two semester course that focuses on history and the internet.  These are History 696: Clio Wired: An Introduction to New Media and History 697: Creating History in New Media. In addition, all students are required to demonstrate basic computer competence.  Being able to use the internet to communicate is an essential element to the study of history at George Mason. 

George Mason University also started the History News Network (HNN), which was launched in June 2001. HNN is the only website on the Internet wholly devoted to the task of putting events in the news into historical perspective every day. The site is updated daily in response to breaking news. HNN is funded by George Mason University. This site, which has its own Facebook page, and features Youtube videos of featuring roundtables with historians on such topics as “Election 2008: How Historic Was It?” Podcast interviews with historians and blogs explore issues that relate history to current events. The publisher and Editor-in-Chief of HNN is Rick Shenkman, who has been interviewed by Jon Stewart about his book How Stupid Are We: The Truth About the American Voter.  The HNN is one of the most visited History sites on the web with 1.3 million page views per month and nearly 300,000 unique visitors per month. 

Not surprisingly, the HNN is sometimes criticized for its approach. To its critics, HNN offers the following explanation: 

” . . . the pressure to publish something in a timely manner necessitates foregoing the slow and steady approach common in peer-reviewed journals. By the peer review standard, none of the articles we publish pass muster as none of them are peer-reviewed in advance; the peer reviewing comes after they have already reached the public. But if that standard is the only standard, then historians must retreat from the journalistic fields and leave the harvesting of interesting views and opinions to others.

This does not sound like a reasonable approach to us. In the fast-paced world in which we now live, public attention is focused on issues for ever briefer periods of time. If scholars want their analyses to be taken into consideration–and why shouldn’t they?–they have to jump into the debate early and with forcefulness.”

Basically, the world has changed and if historians want to matter they need to change as well.  

“We are here today not to just pay tribute to our first patriots, but to take up the cause that they began.” 

Barack Obama, January 17, 2008 [Video features entire speech]

Yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama traced Abraham Lincoln’s historic train ride from Philadelphia to Washington D.C..  Pundits regularly describe Obama’s cabinet choices in terms of a “Team of Rivals,” a concept borrowed for Doris Goodwin’s history of the Lincoln cabinet.  Comparisons and linkages between Obama and John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. can be found all over the media and in the blogosphere.  Obama’s own rhetoric and his writing is full of historical references as he regularly calls on current generations to emulate the sacrifice, courage and service of past generations.   Contrary to what his cynical detractors have said, Obama’s central messages of hope and change are not vacuous slogans. Obama’s messages resonated because they are always framed within the context of American history.  It is ability to link the past, present and future that provide their power to inspire. This is a man who knows history, and more importantly, he knows history matters.  

Although many Canadians claim they long for an Obama-like political leader, it is doubtful someone like Obama would get much traction in Canada.   Canadians just don’t have any sense of Canada’s history and without that understanding, an Obama-like speech would appear vacuous.  It is not the “facts” of history that Canadians would have trouble grasping, it is the idea that something that happened in the past could actually mean something positive to people today and for the future.  You have to believe history matters to make such a connection and Canadians in general don’t believe history matters.  If they did, our political leaders would talk about history.  Political leaders don’t talk about history or link themselves to the past because they know large numbers of Canadians believe the past is nothing but the story of injustice. There is nothing inspiring in the past, and as a result there is nothing inspiring right now either. 

Most Americans don’t know any more “facts” about American history than most Canadians know about Canadian history.  This is a question of attitude not information.  Canadians as a whole need to find the kind of positive reasons to tell stories about their past, the way Barack Obama, so, skilfully tells stories about the American past.  As historian Jack Granatstien wrote in Who Killed Canadian History? “Yes, in the past some Canadians have been racist or sexist or have abused government powers.  Some still are and do. But that is not the whole of the Canadian past, or our present.”  While Americans have Lincoln, King and others, there are no shortage of Canadians who were equally inspiring.  As long as we deny ourselves inspiration from the past, we will also deny ourselves inspiration in the present.