Place and history are powerfully interconnected. As we consume historical stories of the past, we actively create our environment. This environment in turn, is read by historians looking to create our histories.
History: 'place' reflected
Nationalism, Postcolonialism, War History, Imperialism and environmental history have long acknowledged the many stories encoded into the natural and built environment. Place history is literally 'constructed', beyond the academy, as people impress their beliefs, rituals and lifestyle upon their direct environment. Thus, As Dolores Hadyn notes, place is a "container of experiences"; a dynamic reference point upon which factory workers and parlimentarians alike leave their mark. Foucault's insights into contested power and autonomy make place an insightful historical source, as the powerful and powerless can record their experiences across both public and private space. No longer can the historian pan off the spatial and the environmental to the finicky fingers of anthropologists and geographers, but must be willing to read 'the living forest and the paper trail' to come to discover a fuller spectrum of human experience of the past.
Place: history 'consumed'
Perhaps more curious than this process of place 'reflecting' historical experience is, the effect that history, as a culturally 'consumed' product, has upon the places we create. This postmodern concern recognizes that "the stories we tell change the way we act in the world" (Griffiths). Place does not simply record some sort of pure and particular history and must be read critically. Place, as with any other historical 'source', is a text that consumes and reflects simultaneously.
Benedict Andersen's concept of the 'imagined community' describes the inherent human desire to 'imagine' a bond beyond one's direct experience and a wider community or nation. This nostalgic tendency is perhaps evident in the active encouragement of Dolores Haydn as she laments "If Americans were to find their own social history preserved in the public landscapes of their own neighbourhoods and cities, their reactions to the past might be very different". Hadyn is pushing Americans to be more active in working history into their built environment. Hadyn seems to assert that this process will create a healthy sense of continuity with the past. Yet indeed, Thongchai Winichakul calls the historian to be critical of this process of active construction of "our own" history. Winichakul argues that this creates a self-propogating historical lens which naturally stifles new directions of being and belonging. Winichakul indirectly criticizes Hadyn's approach, as his opinion seems to indicate that the creation of places to reflect American social History shall always reflect a certain 'perspective' on American social history, a perspective which can exclude and include according to its approach.
So What?.....
Perhaps, rather than be too neurotic in judging place history or escaping the pitfalls of context and method presented above, the discerning historian ought simply to keep in mind that history as we 'consume' it affects the way we act upon the world, and consider the powerplay involved in this process as one participates. I appreciate the approach of Mark Mckenna, who takes the time to paint for the reader his terms of reference; his personal connection to the place he is historicizing and the national framework within which he is acting.
In exploring these processes in historical inquiry and the diverse stories they make possible, I believe we might indeed come closer to what Mark Mckenna cites as "good history, true stories of the making of this present land, none of them simple some of them painful, all of them a part of our own individual histories'.
Andersen, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983)
Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of the Nation (Honolulu, 1994)
Griffiths, Tom. Forests of Ash: An Environmental History (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), pp189-95.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997),
pp45-53
Walkowitz, Judith. Curriculum Vitae (excerpt from webpage for Dept History, Johns Hopkins University < http://web.jhu.edu/history/Faculty_Bio/walkowitz.html >.
McKenna, Mark. Looking for Blackfellas' Point: An Australian History of Place (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), pp2-11.