History Is Not There To Be Liked: On Historical Memory, Real and Fake
▻https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/09/history-not-liked-historical-memory-real-fake
Historians have the uncomfortable role of shattering people’s memories. One of the societal roles of the historian is to differentiate between memory and history, and to tell people that Gorzkow, by no acceptable definition, was a city. It was—and still is—a village. Such precision relies upon having terminologies and definitions for things. For example, the concept of a city and a definition of what constitutes it. Occasionally definitions shift, and historians have to adjust. Prior to the 1940s, there was no term and definition for the deliberate mass killing of a specific ethnic group. Then, the word “genocide” was created. The term provided a new definition for the Holocaust, and was ascribed to events that occurred prior to the word’s existence yet fit the definition, such as the mass murder of Armenians during World War I. The difficulty is not inventing the term. The difficulty is getting people to accept it.