Memories of the Ancient World

Thucydides 

Herodotus

          Both Thucydides and Herodotus are active agents in the writing of their histories. Even if they had the intention to present the past exactly as it was, they are recording their memories of the past appended with the collected memories of others. What is remembered and what is forgotten in their histories is directly tied to who they are and how they understood events.

          The style of narratives and the overall form of their works differed because of the two authors' goals, and the temporal distance from themselves and the objects of their study. Both are working with memories—their own, and those of others. Herodotus sets out to record the events of the Persian War explicitly as a memory project, to stop the natural tendency where oral histories are forgotten in time.¹ Thucydides, having started his work convinced that the Peloponnesian War would be the most important conflict in history (up to his own time), began recording his understanding of the events as soon as it began.²

Research Proposal for Veterans in Translation: An Oral History of Peace and War

Discussion of the Topic:

          In 1999 the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) was on a regularly scheduled three-month-long deployment in the Pacific Ocean when a fire aboard the USS George Washington (CVN-73) prevented them from taking their rotation in the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Southern Watch. Kitty Hawk, a few weeks away from returning to its home port of Yokosuka, Japan, was tasked to immediately redeploy to cover the gap in the rotation. The crew, having only been trained for the anticipated threats of a cruise under Threat Condition Normal, was not ready to go into a hostile environment where there was a chance of unconventional warfare. Making all speed toward the Gulf, the officers and the Damage Control Training Team (DCTT, pronounced DE-set) stepped up every possible training program on the aging ship.

          September 11, 2001 was still a long ways away, and the 1991 Operation Desert Storm was a long time before. The only recent activity in the Gulf that had made international news was in 1998 when Iraq allowed weapons inspectors to enter the country. Before Saddam Hussein had struck an agreement, the 1MC (1 Main Circuit, a public address system) at Recruit Training Facility Great Lakes, Il., crackled to life in the middle of one of the many, nearly identical days I spent at Basic Training. After a short briefing on the situation in Iraq, all of us recruits looked at each other with confusion and foreboding. Before we could flood our Recruit Division Commander with questions, he departed the barracks, leaving us alone to grapple with the news we had just received.

          “Are we going to war?” asked a fellow recruit whose name I will never remember, but whose wavering voice and deeply concerned expression I will never forget.

The Study of History

The following is a statement of my personal understanding of the study of History, and how it relates to the past, relics, collective memories, and the meaning of the past.

1. History is the study of the past.
2. The past is a set of events that occurred previous to the present.
3. Events can leave evidence, which is known as relics.
4. Not all events create relics.
5. The relation that makes a relic historically significant is that it was affected by the past in a way that could bear meaning.
6. Human-created relics can bear meaning.
7. Relics act as symbols for bundles of meanings.
8. The relation between the bundles of meanings associated with relics and the past is determined by collectives of individuals.
9. The collectives normalize meaning amongst themselves via communication about the remembered past.
10. Collectives are determined by some aspect of commonality.
    1. Degrees of difference can remove individuals from identifiable collectives.
    2. Collectives are not necessarily inclusive or exclusive.