Personal experiences are a vital part of history.
My memory project – interviewing my Grandmother about her memories of war – raised some interesting questions for me about different perspectives and memories of events. I have done a few research projects and interviews for history at high school, talking to people involved in significant New Zealand events like the Springbok Tours or conscientious objection movements. However, these people were generally directly involved in whatever their event was and provided perspectives that have already been well documented.
However, interviewing my Grandma was a more personal experience, and one which I was more involved in. The interview was much more about her as she lived through different events, rather than the events themselves. My memory project aimed to show one of the many perspectives and experiences that come as a result of conflict. I find the specific details about someone’s experiencing of an event much more interesting than statistics by themselves.
The idea of personal approaches to research in history brought me back to Kate Hannah’s lecture and her discussion of human emotion in researching the past. The attached reading by Katie Barclay discussed the importance of acknowledging historians’ emotions, arguing that it should be seen as something productive. The reading and lecture helped me properly recognise the importance of showing humanity and subjective experiences in history. While attempting for objectivity and statistics are undeniably important, I believe they mean little if they do not have a human context to them. In order to understand the impact of an event on a large group of people, we must first understand the impact on an individual. Personal, subjective retellings of history can often be more moving than statistics – an example that springs to mind is our culture’s focus on Anne Frank and her personal experience of Europe in the 1940’s. Millions of other Jews fared similar fates, but the full scale of this cannot be properly comprehended. Her individual experience has humanity and reflects the experiences of many others. Personal experiences and anecdotes are important in history as they show the human side of events, which can then be applied to a larger group.
Another interesting aspect of the human and emotional side of history is in fiction. Showing a personal – and, in this case, even fictional – experience of an event allows us to imagine how we would have reacted to an event ourselves. This year I’ve worked my way through Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, which focuses on the rise of Henry VIII’s right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell had often been seen as a villainous character and was p
ortrayed negatively in a number of books and films before Wolf Hall. However, Mantel’s interpretation of Cromwell reveals a new side to him – while he is by no means a ‘good guy’, there is a humanity to him. Before reading the series, I had never particularly cared about Tudor England and knew little about its history; now I really feel like I understand at lea
st part of that world. Wolf Hall shows the power of historical fiction in re-contextualising and re-interpreting events to reveal a human side of the past.
Whether in history or fiction, revealing personal experiences is necessary for a reader to fully immerse themselves in a different point of time.
