The new Gettysburg Address: fusing history and memory

Different observers, according to Karl Mannheim, encircle the same event from different locations, see it from different perspectives, arrive at different insights. Yet, Mannheim never asks whether there are standpoints that lead to unique distortions as well as unique understandings. To answer this question few sources of evidence are more useful than the changing meaning of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln's and succeeding generations believed that the Gettysburg Address consoled, inspired the people to continue their fight, and, above all, celebrated democracy and Union. Many contemporary historians and artists, however, believe that Lincoln at Gettysburg spoke about emancipation and racial justice. Their fusing of history, the objective recording of the past, and commemoration, the idealization of the past in terms of present concerns, occurs amid the rise of egalitarian and minority rights movements. Far from history's pulverizing commemoration, as the conventional wisdom of collective memory scholarship, from Maurice Halbwachs to Pierre Nora, asserts, commemoration often insinuates itself into and distorts history. Karl Mannheim's synthetic method-integrating the partial insights of separate generations-awaits a future generation of ideologically detached scholars.