Children's Literature Association Quarterly

History is more or less bunk.

—Henry Ford

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

—Oscar Wilde

This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.

—Terry Pratchett

My first two epigraphs served to set up a paper I wrote for a conference in 1997. As I contemplate these epigraphs now, I shudder a bit. Oh, I suppose I thought the "bunk" one was funny and the Wilde one serious. The two epigraphs set out two prevalent attitudes to history: either it is something we can set aside as less than useful or it is something we keep on rewriting in order to shape the present in ways that conform to some ideological position we wish to support. In other words, history is either unimportant or else it is all-important. If it is all-important, this is because our versions of history shape the political present. The Pratchett quotation says as much. Truth, in the sense of incontrovertible accuracy of representation, has little to do with what we take to be representations of history.

Wilde's assertion suggests that history consists of the recreating and reshaping of the past (both past events and past ways of life) for ideological purposes. If history is a nightmare, then the way for us to wake from it is to rewrite it. To rewrite history is to reshape the making of history, and to reshape the making of history is to transform the world in which history is taking shape. History can only be bunk if it is fiction, untrue, without current value (without currency, even). History, however, is not simply fiction, not merely the stuff of story that we take to be entertaining; it has the power to influence our attitude to ourselves. The shape we give to history has transformative power; our responsibility to those who lived that history lies in the kind of transformation we seek. Rewritings of history can perpetuate the nightmare or set off an alarm.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot makes a distinction between "the materiality of the socio-historical process (historicity 1)" and "historical narratives (historicity 2)" (29). The first consists of "the facts of the matter," and the second takes the form of "a narrative of those facts" (2). Trouillot also points out that the stories we fashion from the facts of history are not the preserve of professional historians. Stories of history come to us from various narrative sites: theme parks, films and television, the work of both amateur and professional historians, and of course out-and-out fictions. I [End Page 49] suspect that our children receive history more from fictions of history than from the stories of professional historians. In other words, the history our children receive comes, to a large extent, from narratives that use history as a backdrop for their stories or as the shape of commercial enterprise. Increasingly, we receive information of a variety of kinds from amateur sources. The World Wide Web has upped the ante in the proliferation of information from both amateur and professional sources.

Now receiving information from a variety of professional and non-professional sources has its virtues. It also has its dangers. One possible danger is a focus on information in and of itself, rather than on the source of information or the motives that might have caused the source to use some data and neglect others. In other words, if I may invoke Michel Foucault, when we have a surplus of information, we might well fail to consider the ubiquitous influence of power in the choice of information. All this is pretty familiar now. We know that what we take as "history" consists largely of a narrative reconstruction of aspects (both events and forms) of the past. We have narratives that reconstruct the events of history (the French Revolution, or the 1838 Rebellion in Upper Canada, and so on), and we have narratives that reconstruct what living conditions were like at a certain time in the past (life on the U.S. or Canadian prairie in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries...