“The monumental is the history that glorifies the nation-state that is represented in monuments that do not question anything about the society,” Foner said. “A lot of history is like
that. The rise of history as a discipline coincided with the rise of the nation-state. Every nation needs a set of myths to justify its own existence. Another one of my favorite writers,
Ernest Renan, the French historian, wrote, ‘The historian is the enemy of the nation.’ It’s an interesting thing to say. He doesn’t mean they’re spies or anything. The historian
comes along and takes apart the mythologies that are helping to underpin the legitimacy of the nation. That’s why people don’t like them very often. They don’t want to hear
these things. Antiquarian is what a lot of people are. That’s fine. They’re looking for their personal roots, their family history. They’re going on ancestry.com to find out where their
DNA came from. That’s not really history exactly. They don’t have much of a historical context. But it stimulates people to think about the past. Then there’s what Nietzsche calls
critical history—the history that judges and condemns. It takes a moral stance. It doesn’t just relate the facts. It tells you what is good and what is evil. A lot of historians don’t like
to do that. But to me, it’s important. It’s important for the historian, having done the research, having presented the history, to say here’s where I stand in relation to all these
important issues in our history.”
The rest of the story is here.
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