Program/Event
Undergraduate Summer Research Showcase 2023
Abstract
In recent years this nation has been undergoing a public debate about its past. This debate ranges from academic projects such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project to the Florida Department of Education’s recent judgments regarding a new AP African American Studies Course. Through watching these debates, I was led to the following questions: What is the past? How or why can it be changed? And what is its relevance to politics and education? For This I turned to Augustine’s Confessions (1961) and post-war German Philosophy, specifically the works of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt. For this project, Augustine’s conception of memory is the main basis. Specifically, his conception of the past as memory. I then take Augustine’s understanding of individual memory and expand it to include dependence on other people for certain memories – those memories we did not produce and. It is these memories that are easily manipulated by the sources we must depend on. I then look to Arendt’s Truth and Politics (1967) where I examine how external sources can manipulate or deviate the past, and how they too can be manipulated internally. This project, and the work that has been done thus far, may help us understand the past in better ways. Debating about what happened, why it is important, and how it should be taught can only go so far if we are uncertain about what the past even is, how it can be manipulated, and its relevance to worldly politics and education. If we wish to deliberate about our past, we must be informed of what it is.
Recommended Citation
Heggie, Andrew T.
(2024)
"Manipulation Of The Past,"
The Cardinal Edge: Vol. 2:
Iss.
2, Article 5.
Available at:
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/tce/vol2/iss2/5
