"When asked why he [James Urry] was so interested in Mennonite history, he thought
for a moment then burst out laughing and said: 'Because I'm mad!' "
Mennonite Mirror, January 1987
Daut wia soo lang tridj, daut es meist nijch meea soo.
That was so long ago, it is almost no longer so.
Rudy Wiebe, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest (Toronot: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2006), ix.
"History as a political endeavour has already been discussed at some length in the previous chapter. Here, it is worth briefly reiterating that, whatever we may think the nature of history is, we do it and will go on doing it. Our sense of both individual and collective identity is intrinsically rooted in a sense of where we have come from; and we constantly, as part of our very existence, seek to understand our paths through the world, the opportunities seized and lost, the openings and closures that constitute our lives. For all the discussion of this and preceding chapters, the search for historical understanding, whether collective or merely individual and autobiographical, is — and this I would hazard without the usual cluster of qualifications when on embarks on any remark of this sort — an intrinsic element of the condition of being human, in the same way as the physical functions of eating, sleeping and reproduction."
Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), 193.
"Mennonites in the U. S. are overwhelmingly white people, indistinguishable from the majority of white America in their dress and behavior. Nevertheless, they have been and continue to be very different from that same white American majority in significant ways, especially during times when the nation is at war. They are, in a very real sense, a minority group, although it is less the case now than it was when I was a child attending summer Bible school at the Hartville Mennonite Church in Ohio. As a member of the Mennonite Church I have often asked myself: How did I, a member of the country's most despised minority group, manage to become part of another?"
Lee Roy Berry, Jr., "Mennonites, African-Americans, the U. S. Constitution and the Problem of Assimilation," Mennonite Quarterly Review 80 (July 2006), 337-338.
"Indians, Hispanics, Asians, blacks, Anglos, businesspeople, workers, politicians, bureaucrats, natives, and newcomers, we share the same region and its history, but we wait to be introduced. The serious exploration of the historical process that made us neighbors provides that introduction."
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987), 349.
Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur . . .
Quid-quid latet apparebit.
A written book will be brought forth,
in which all shall be contained . . .
whatever lies hidden shall be revealed.
from the Latin text of the requiem
"What has been written creates, what is unwritten brings chaos and separation."
Olga Friedenberg to Boris Pasternak, The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Friedenberg, 1910-1954 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 287; quoted by Leonard Gross, "Mennonite Historical Concerns: Past and Present," Mennonite Historical Bulletin, vol. 51, no. 4, Oct. 1990, p. 1.
"Free from external oppression the Mennonites oppressed each other, in faith, in business and in society."
James Urry describing Russian Mennonites in the 1860s, "The Closed and the Open: Social and Religious Change amongst the Mennonites in Russia (1789-1889)" (Ph. D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1978), p. 644.
"Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind."
W. H. Auden (1907-1973), British poet, The Dyer's Hand, 'D. H. Lawrence'
"Neurosis, in individuals or groups, is a frightened clinging to the past, and remaining a slave to the forgotten."
Weston LaBarre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 22
"Most minority history is still where Frederick Jackson Turner's history was in 1893: It is a celebration of 'my people,' a record of what 'we' have accomplished, a lament for how 'we' have been neglected or oppressed or underappreciated. Eventually, one supposes, that will change, as it has in the case of the dominant white majority, and Hispanic and Indian and Asian-American communities will find themselves confronting their own intellectual dissidents. Meanwhile, the white majority of the American West has reached the point where it ought to be secure enough in its power and wealth that it can expect something from historians besides the subservient role of cheerleader or defender."
Donald Worster, "Beyond the Agrarian Myth," in Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991), p. 24
"History is basically an effort to tell the truth about the past."
John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 132.
"History is never dead. It is not even past."
William Faulkner (one of his characters), quoted in Richard A. Straw, "Informal Writing and Engaging the Past," OAH Newsletter, vol. 19, no. 4, Nov. 1991, p. 6
"I imagine a past in which some truth lies. This past is a place that yields a dense, almost impenetrable, imaginitive growth. Historians can only hope to tap this fertility and trim and discipline what grows so luxuriantly. Beyond history's garden gates, the thick jungle of the past remains, and memory's trails lead off into it."
Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 303.
"Lives are not stories. A day, a month, a year, or a lifetime has no plot. Our experiences are only the raw stuff of stories. The beginnings of our lives are arbitrary; usually their endings come too soon or too late for any neat narrative conclusions.
"We turn our lives into stories, and, in doing so, we can stop them where we choose. Our stories do in a small way what memoirs and autobiographies do on a grander scale: they allow a self-fashioning that gives remembered lives a coherence that the day-to-day lives of actual experience lack. History, of course, also imposes coherence, but the historian works will less malleable stuff than memory. Memoirs are seamless; good histories disrupt."
Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 292.
"She wants her silence to be final. Here, more than anyplace else, she wants her memory uncontested. She does not want me talking to others, gathering other stories, looking into the remnants of my father's past. When she is silent, she wants those things about which she refuses to speak to remain as quiet as the tomb. That is the ultimate power of stories. They take on themselves the decision about what will be remembered and what will be told. The part of the past she claims most fiercely is the part she wants forgotten.
Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 247-248.
"The chronology that I as a historian want is not the way that this past survives in my mother's mind. In memory all the events of her romance with my father—the great romance of her life—and their marriage mix together like coins dropped for years into a jar. Reconstructing the order of their arrival, their chronology, is hard. A chronology of her feelings is virtually impossible.
"I want the impossible. I want her to remember the past as if she did not know what followed after their beginning."
Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 247.
"As she had in Ireland, Sara moved among the shadows of events that had taken place long ago. The past is more than memory; fleeing it, forgetting it, or hiding it does not eliminate it. Kitty could leave Tim, maybe she could even forget Tim, but then her brother and nieces appeared, wearing the obligations that sprang from Tim like a bright glowing badge only she could see. And what could she do? Tommy O'Brien, who may have known nothing of the past and not cared to know, lived in its shadow just the same. And so did Sara.
Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 174-175.
"No one stands alone in Irish American families. You are born into a web of relations. By yourself, you are little more than a human dot, insignificant and indistinguishable. Connect all the dots, and there is family. You exist as a point in a set of relations. You may ignore or rage against your relations, the people who define you less by what you do or say or think or accomplish and more by who your parents are and whom you marry. In the end, you are still so-and-so's daughter and niece to so-and-so. When things get bad enough, you follow the lines to safety."
Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 166.
"It is hard to separate these things once you have woven them together in memory. They seem a record of what happened, but memory is the shifting record of the sense we make of things.
"We alter stories. We drop some altogether, and we add others. Who is to know? We often do not know ourselves. We change; our stories change.
"But our stories make a claim on the past. This is how it happened, they say. It is an unexamined claim; it is a dangerous claim. Our stories are vessels that float on the seas of the past; there are things out there that can sink or redirect them, for the past is full of dead things preserved on paper or in the land itself but unremembered by any living person.
"Memory is a living thing vulnerable to this dead past until memory itself dies with its creator. We can record memories, but then they are fixed on the page, pinned like insects in a collection, bodies of what was alive. We can pass memories on, but then they become someone else's memories; they live on like children. They are living descendants of our memories, but no more our memories than children are their parents.
"History is a dead thing brought to new life. It is fragments of a past, dead and gone, resurrected by historians. It is in this sense like Frankenstein's monster. It threatens our versions of ourselves.
"I live, in a way probably only other historians can fully appreciate, in this junkyard of the past. I haul pieces into the present, and there they confront my mother's memories.
Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 20-21.
"Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present, for if it is familiar why revisit it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time."
Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 13.
"Merciless order ought to prevail in archives. They are quite simply the crystallization of a wish to put the past in order."
Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow (1992). Quoted in an email by Bob Coghill to the Archives and Archivists email list, 1 June 2001, about "Archival quotes"
"Archivists are like mechanics, no one wants to give them money or the time of day until something breaks when they become gods amongst men."
Alex Rankin. Quoted in an email by Bob Coghill to the Archives and Archivists email list, 1 June 2001, about "Archival quotes"
"Citizens! Protect monuments, buildings, objects and documents from former times. All of these are your history and your pride. Remember that this is the basis upon which our new art shall flourish!"
Vladimir Lenen, November 1917. Quoted in an email by Bob Coghill to the Archives and Archivists email list, 1 June 2001, about "Archival quotes"
"The truth is that trying to know the present without knowing the past is like trying to navigate through unfamiliar terrain without map or compass. Knowledge of past achievements and failures gives important insight into how we, as a Congress and as a country, can emulate one and avoid the other. Such understanding gives insight into human nature, which has remained virtually unchanged since the birth of mankind. History helps me to refine my thinking and shape my approaches to issues.
G. K. Chesterton put it far more eloquently and succinctly that I when he wrote: The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living."
Senator Robert C. Byrd, in Raymond W. Smock, "In Conversation with Robert C. Byrd," AHA Perspectives, January 2004.
About literary theory: "As a friend of mine said: We used to do Dante, then with New Criticism we did Dante's works, then with new historicism we did Dante's world, then with deconstruction we did Dante and me, and now we just do me."
Merry Wiesner-Hanks, "Traditional Orthodoxies and New Approaches: An Editor's Perspective on the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation," Church History, vol. 67, no. 1, March 1998, p. 112.
"The reality of pluralist democracy is that groups living together must be free to talk about one another's history and culture. Without these exchanges, they cannot build a durable civic life."
Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 224.
"We cannot dissever our life from that of the past. We inherit its arts and improve that a little; we inherit its pleasures and make but a slight change; we inherit its speech and improve our expression only to a slight degree; we inherit its institutions and modify the forms of justice only in small particulars, and we entertain new ideas only as we have discovered a few new facts. So we are indebted to the dead for that which we are, and are governed by the dead in all our activities. Yet the past is not a tyranny on the present, but an informing energy which evolves through us that the future may be improved."
John Wesley Powell (quoted in Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 466. Original source is p. 161 of Powell, "The Five Books of History," Science 1 (1895): 157-161.)
"There is no family in Germany that did not learn some kind of lesson from the two World Wars."
Günter Grass, quoted in Time, vol. 161, no. 17, 28 Apr 2003, p. 70.
"Must victims feel guilty and repent? Should it not be the other way around, that those who caused their suffering repent and ask for forgiveness? Are victims responsible for the injury done to them? And what should Mennonites repent of? That through hard work, sobriety and thrift they became well-to-do? That as settlers they were privileged by the Tsars and held up by them as examples of success, as agriculturalists, business people and educators? That they refused to welcome the Soviet regime with open arms but resisted, at least nonviolently and behind closed doors, the new order with its godless ideology? That they did not willingly give up their land and property, nor support collectivization? That the mothers wished to preserve their faith and way of life at all cost and pass them on to their fatherless children? And that they desired to emigrate when their stay in the Soviet Union became unbearable? Should Mennonites repent and ask for forgiveness for all these things?"
Harry Loewen, "A Mennonite-Christian View of Suffering: The Case of Russian Mennonites in the 1930s and 1940s," Mennonite Quarterly Review 77:1 (January 2003): 60-61.
"And what of local history? Is it of use only as a case study of national trends? From some dissertation titles and editorial comments, one might think so. Is its purpose primarily pride, even if that is based on mythology? Is it enough to skim the simple surface and pull out the people and events that happen to be remembered or that a given establishment or counterculture thinks are appropriate to remember, no matter how untypical, stereotyped, or extreme? And is the weight of historical accounts to be measured by their chronological or geographical scope or by the extent to which they generalize without local detail? Are things really so much the same everywhere, or should they be? Should local and regional history be left in the hands of antiquarians and genealogists, thus deteriorating into a useful but clearly subsidiary subcategory of the real thing? And why should the local history of an English shire or a New England colonial town be academically respectable, capable of revealing universal truths, but a study of a Kansas town is perceived as narrow to insignificance?"
Craig Miner, Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 403.
"Every institution, be it a university, or a college, or even a church, is the product of some tradition or heritage. And the first business of the institution is to understand itself in the context of that heritage. We cannot be effective educators on any subject until we know something about ourselves, and where we've come from."
Wynn Goering, "New Ceremonies" (convocation address, Bethel College, 2 Sep 1992), 8.
"I find the world very odd and I want to know how it got that way."
R. H. Tawney, quoted in Wendy Murphy Zoba, "A Sense of Place: The Many Horizons of Martin E. Marty," Christian Century 119:22 (Oct 23-Nov 5, 2002): 24.
"The practice of history in its modern mode is, in one view, just
one long exercise of the deep satisfaction of finding things."
Carolyn Steedman, "Something She Called a Fever:
Michelet, Derrida, and Dust," American Historical Review 106 (4: Oct 2001), 1164.
"For the fever usually comes on at the end of the penultimate day
in the record office. Either you must leave after tomorrow (train
timetables, journeys planned) or the archive is about to shut for
the weekend. And it's expensive being in the archive, as your credit
card clocks up the price of the room, the restaurant meals. Leaving
is the only way to stop spending. Your anxiety is that you will not
finish, that there will be something left unread, unnoted,
untranscribed. You are not anxious about the Great Unfinished,
knowledge of which is the very condition of your being there in the
first place, and of the grubby trade you set out in, years ago. You
know perfectly well that despite the infinite heaps of things
they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, it
is in fact, practically nothing at all. There is the great, brown,
slow-moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is the
tiny flotsam that has ended up in the record office you are working in.
Your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater, and
your competence in that was established long ago. Your anxiety is
more precise and more prosaic. It's about PT S2/1/1, which only
arrived from the stacks that afternoon, which is enormous, and which
you will never get through tomorrow."
Carolyn Steedman, "Something She Called a Fever:
Michelet, Derrida, and Dust," American Historical Review 106 (4: Oct 2001), 1165.
"If scandal is taken at the truth, then it is better to allow scandal to arise than
to abandon the truth."
Pope Gregory the Great [quoted in Hans Küng, The Council,
Reform and Reunion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 45; Küng footnotes 'Gregory
the Great, In Ezech. Hom. 7, PL, 77, 324.']
"The historian's highest calling is not to reproduce the experience of the past, but
to learn from it -- and to share that learning with others. Doing history involves
distillation and refraction that yield clarification and meaning. Ironically, the more
closely our perspective on the past resembles the multisensory fullness of our
experience of the present, the less instructive history may be for practitioners and
audiences alike."
Gary J. Kornblith, "Venturing into the Civil War, Virtually: A Review,"
Journal of American History, June 2001, p. 150.
"The history of the world is the judgement of the world." [Die Weltgeschichte ist das
Weltgericht.]
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) in Resignation
(1786).
"I will open my mouth in a parable
I will utter dark sayings of old.
Things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers told us.
We will not hide them from their children,
but tell it to the coming generations."
Psalm 78:1-4
"Not to know what happened before we were born is to remain perpetually a child.
For what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors
by the records of history."
Cicero
"The business of public history is to facilitate the composition of good narratives
based on the consensus that emerges from inclusive discussion sorted through core values
that expose destructive perspectives."
Robert R. Archibald, A Place to Remember: Using History to Build
Community (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999), p. 136.
"Places are produced in that wonderful interaction of people, place, narrative, and
time. When the people desert these places, narratives are forgotten, ties break, and the
place is unmade. What is un-remembered in abandonment cannot be re-remembered in
transient automobile suburbs with too few places for shared experience and story making.
The extreme is amnesia, and it means that those afflicted do not know who they are
anymore. They are disoriented, isolated, and robbed of the ability to recognize emotional
attachments to others. The sufferers do not have a coherent story anymore. Un-remembering
is the enemy of good places and of public history."
Robert R. Archibald, A Place to Remember: Using History to Build
Community (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999), p. 150.
"While history offers us many stories worth telling, some belong to other people, who paid for them with
their lives.
"We may retell their stories badly or well. We may embellish them or get
them wrong. But we should not do so blithely, just as we should not scrawl slogans
on other people's houses, or stride into their living rooms to replace the furniture.
"Thinking that we can is not novel history. It's novel morality,
unworthy of artists and storytellers."
Carlin Romano, "Accuracy: A Novel Notion in Historical Novels?" Chronicle
of Higher Education, 13 Apr 2001 (vol. 47, no. 31), p. B13
"We lay aside letters to read them again, and at last we destroy them
out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate
breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others."
--Goethe (quoted in an email to the Archives online discussion list,
14 March 2001, found at refdesk.com)
Last Updated on 22 May 2007 by John D. Thiesen
Link back to home page