Reflection
Over three blog posts, I have considered how some of the concepts we discussed this semester help us understand the historical and current labor movements in the United States, and the commemoration that has been built around them. I explicitly connected the repression of education about the Battle at Blair Mountain to Eviatar Zerubavel’s piece “Social Memories: Steps towards a Sociology of the Past,” a modern recreation of the march on Blair Mountain to Christina Simko’s conception of “working through” and “acting out” traumatic events, and the modern surge of unionization attempts to Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage’s notion of commemorability and mnemonic capacity in their article “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma” as the two factors that are necessary to successfully create a lasting commemorative vessel. Common themes that emerged throughout this series of posts include the ongoing struggle between the interests of the working class and the capitalist class and the power that memory holds for how we understand the present.
Throughout my posts, we see the separate and almost completely opposing interests of two groups of people: those who work and those who employ. These interests and the political economy that they contribute to seem to directly relate to the way people remember, and the way they want and allow others to remember. In the case of the Battle of Blair Mountain, miners wanted a more just workplace, free of the tyranny of company towns and mine guards. Mine operators wanted to make as much profit as possible. These interests are diametrically opposed. In the years that followed, the mine owners wanted people to forget that they killed many of their employees, while workers, although complacent for a time after unionization was successful following the New Deal, wanted people to know in order to secure justice, both for the dead and for the living, who were experiencing new forms of environmental exploitation. We see the same pattern in the case of modern labor organization. The two sides have directly opposed interests, so there is a struggle for control over the modern means of mnemonic production, social media. It was not until I began working on this project that I started to understand the connection between memory production and political economy. The way people remember the past distinctly changes their understanding of the present, which, in turn, changes the way they vote, campaign, and so on.
Outside of politics, this is still a ground-shifting way of understanding the world. This project, and this class more generally, allowed me to understand the power of the ways we create history. When I told my dad, who is a history professor, that I was surprised and intrigued by the idea presented early in the semester by Hobsbawm that history is a creation of the present, he said that was commonly understood by historians and acted as if it was an obvious truth. I disagree with him. While it may be a common understanding in certain academic fields, it does not seem, to me, to be common knowledge. At the very least, it takes some prodding to get someone who has never thought that way to consider the world in this light. One of my biggest takeaways from the course is that this understanding should be spread more widely. Even if historians are aware that they are creating rather than reporting when they do history, lay people often see a historian’s word as fact. A concerted effort to spread the way of thinking we used in this class to more people would be an important part of the broader project of making the work produced in academia more accessible. This is a project I believe is crucial.
My work on these pieces has challenged my understanding of the world around me. Where I used to see pure political economics I now see, additionally, a struggle to secure favorable understandings of the past in the future.
Throughout my posts, we see the separate and almost completely opposing interests of two groups of people: those who work and those who employ. These interests and the political economy that they contribute to seem to directly relate to the way people remember, and the way they want and allow others to remember. In the case of the Battle of Blair Mountain, miners wanted a more just workplace, free of the tyranny of company towns and mine guards. Mine operators wanted to make as much profit as possible. These interests are diametrically opposed. In the years that followed, the mine owners wanted people to forget that they killed many of their employees, while workers, although complacent for a time after unionization was successful following the New Deal, wanted people to know in order to secure justice, both for the dead and for the living, who were experiencing new forms of environmental exploitation. We see the same pattern in the case of modern labor organization. The two sides have directly opposed interests, so there is a struggle for control over the modern means of mnemonic production, social media. It was not until I began working on this project that I started to understand the connection between memory production and political economy. The way people remember the past distinctly changes their understanding of the present, which, in turn, changes the way they vote, campaign, and so on.
Outside of politics, this is still a ground-shifting way of understanding the world. This project, and this class more generally, allowed me to understand the power of the ways we create history. When I told my dad, who is a history professor, that I was surprised and intrigued by the idea presented early in the semester by Hobsbawm that history is a creation of the present, he said that was commonly understood by historians and acted as if it was an obvious truth. I disagree with him. While it may be a common understanding in certain academic fields, it does not seem, to me, to be common knowledge. At the very least, it takes some prodding to get someone who has never thought that way to consider the world in this light. One of my biggest takeaways from the course is that this understanding should be spread more widely. Even if historians are aware that they are creating rather than reporting when they do history, lay people often see a historian’s word as fact. A concerted effort to spread the way of thinking we used in this class to more people would be an important part of the broader project of making the work produced in academia more accessible. This is a project I believe is crucial.
My work on these pieces has challenged my understanding of the world around me. Where I used to see pure political economics I now see, additionally, a struggle to secure favorable understandings of the past in the future.
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