henry glassie on history as the work of a “a forked mortal trapped in the unknowable flux.”
History is not the past. History is a story about the past, told in the present, and designed to be useful in the constructing of the future.
…History is picked at, scraped down, patched up, and encrusted with new ornament.
…History begins in the will of the historian, a forked mortal trapped in the unknowable flux. The courageous act of history is the act of the historian who ignores most people and events while selecting a tiny number of facts and arranging them artfully and truthfully in order to speak usefully about the human condition.
…History is intangible, a phantom of the mind, yet it is distanced from the dream of the self. History is a variety of imaginative literature, yet it shuns fancy for fact. As in making things, in thinking history, the real, the true is manipulated, arranged, made useful, accepted, made proof. Like artifacts, history depends on the individual for existence, but like the artifact, it is drawn from the world beyond the self, then pushed back into that world for objective evaluation.
…There is only one past but many histories. We think of one of them—our own—as ‘history’ and the others as ‘folk histories,’ but they are either all histories or all folk histories. All involve collecting facts about the past and arranging them artfully to explore the problems of the present.
…The reason to study people, to order experience into ethnography, is not to produce more entries for the central file or more trinkets for milord’s cabinet of curiosities. It is to stimulate thought, to assure us there are things we do not know, things we must know, things capable of unsettling the world we inhabit.
— Henry Glassie