Do historians ever encounter the mandala effect?

by [deleted]

[deleted]

TrueBirch

“For all of us, there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalised record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life.”

Historians often change their opinions throughout the course of performing research, and it can cause tension when those new opinions conflict with a historian's own memories. Saul Friedländer, James Young, and others have written about this tension. The job of a historian is to put the empirical research findings first. James Oaks said it better than I ever could:

"The problem with people like that," my friend said about a fellow historian, "is that they have not changed their minds about anything in 30 years." It was one of the worst things you could say about a reputable scholar, I thought. It meant the person had stopped thinking ages ago. The mind had shut down. They'd figured it all out by the time the dissertation was submitted. It was so different from my own experience, from the way I was taught, from the way I've always imagined historians work. We don't just revise other scholars; we revise ourselves.

If you're interested in seeing examples of the changing approach to history, historian Kyle Ward examined the treatment of different historical events in history textbooks. He found that our understanding of events can change dramatically over time. He published his findings as a book called History in the Making.

sunagainstgold

Can you please be more specific about what you mean? Are you talking about:

  • If we have 100 surviving sources from the 13th century that say 12th century Cistercians drained the Low Countries and made them suitable for farming, and this is codified in history books...then archaeology tells us the land had been farmed for centuries?

or

  • When I spend 4 fruitless hours searching and searching and searching for a book on the library of St. Katherine's in Nuremberg with the perfectly reasonable search term "st katherine dominican convent library"...because I remembered the book being in English when it's actually in German and all I needed to do was search "st katharina bibliothek"?

or something else?