The Past Is Not a Foreign Country
On preserving difficult histories
Despite the insistence that the past is fundamentally different from the present, we can never access or explain the differences. What has survived and exists still is very much not a foreign country, and it was saved over other parts of the past on purpose and by accident.
People today are very much the same as they were in the past. Those who use the adage “the past is a foreign country” typically do so to advance a mechanical view of the world, suggesting progress from one state of being to another. To look at an event, we must define when it began and ended.
For example, if we were to look at the East St. Louis Massacre of 1917, we might say it began earlier than the massacre itself. The National Guard was called up on May 28 to respond to violence reported after a meeting of white union workers resulted in violence against black people in downtown East St. Louis. The massacre occurred on July 2, widely reported and investigated by W. E. B. DuBois and Ida Wells Barnett. Yet can we say the massacre began with the violence of May 28? Can we write the history of the massacre without mentioning anything before July 2?
History is filled with inconsistencies, politics, and cultural assumptions. Historians are well aware of this. Yet people on the street are…
