OCH Publications > Oregon Humanities table of contents
Oregon Humanities is a journal of ideas and perspectives published three times a year by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Each issue includes essays and articles that explore a particular theme from a variety of perspectives, broadening the ways in which readers think about a subject and providing a basis for further thoughtful discussion.
Oregon Humanities Spring 2009
- Kathleen Holt
- EDITOR
- Raina Hassan
- PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
- Jennifer Viviano
- GRAPHIC DESIGN
- Allison Dubinsky
- COPY EDITOR
- Editorial Advisory Board
- Tom Booth
- Brian Doyle
- Debra Gwartney
- Julia Heydon
- Marianne Keddington-Lang
- Guy Maynard
- Win McCormack
- Camela Raymond
- Kate Sage
- Rich Wandschneider
- Dave Weich
- Curt Yehnert
Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published triannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 813 SW Alder Street, Suite 702, Portland, Oregon 97205.
We welcome letters from readers. If you would like a letter published, subject to editorial discretion, please include a daytime telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity. Oregon Humanities is provided free of charge to Oregonians.
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To submit articles and essays for consideration, please read our writers' guidelines.
Monuments to Nostalgia
In his essay "The Necessity of Ruins," landscape scholar and writer J.B. Jackson says there are two ways of viewing history: as being grounded in a strong sense of a specific political past, or as what he describes as steeped in a private vernacular past or "a golden age where there are no dates or names, simply a sense of the way it used to be, history as the chronicle of everyday existence."
Jackson, whose main focus in this essay is the use of monuments to commemorate history, says that contemporary Americans are more apt to value a vernacular past and, thus, more interested in preserving reminders of a bygone era rather than records of significant events and people. But, he says, such a nostalgic, ahistoric view prevents citizens from fully understanding how a country's past, present, and future are powerfully linked.
Jackson's observations about these two treatments of the past point to an inherent conflict between the ideas of continuity and singularity, between being a part of history and being outside of history--an important thing to keep in mind as Oregonians celebrate the 150th anniversary of statehood this year. Can we see ourselves both as the most recent members of a larger community of citizens and as unique individuals who carve our own distinct paths through time? Can we not only acknowledge historical events, but also understand how our actions today are both a response to the past and a way of shaping the future?
Although I appreciate Jackson's concerns about overly personalizing history to the detriment of our civic lives, I occasionally fall into the sentimental habit of remembering "the good old days" and pining for them when the present seems lacking. To compensate, I tell myself that I critically confront the past when I see layers of time in my daily life: brand-new concrete and glass condos stacked up next to 1920s bungalows, a decades-old cast-iron Dutch oven sitting atop a gleaming stainless-steel gas range, Facebook friends from the various eras of my past who collectively seem to span time. But the problem with these examples is that they provide no sense of narrative or chronology, no sense of inspiration and motivation: they are simply piles of history stacked up next to one another on the same plane. Without context and reflection, without a clear understanding of how they are linked together across time and space, they become flat monuments to a nostalgic vernacular past rather than dynamic proofs of a continuous history. And as writers in this issue of Oregon Humanities remind us, active interrogation of the past can be the most useful tool we have for moving forward.
In keeping with this spirit of productively using the past, I'd like to take the chance to apologize for two errors that appeared in the fall 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities: the omission of a paragraph in Brian Doyle's essay "A Prison That Grew to Fit His Face" and an incorrect use of "procreation" rather than "creation" in Tiffany Lee Brown's essay "The Bubble of Silence." We sincerely apologize for these errors and have posted corrected versions of these fine essays on the OCH website at www.oregonhum.org/oregon-humanities-fall-2008.php.
--Kathleen Holt, Editor
Published in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.
© 2009 Oregon Council for the Humanities