History and Popular Memory

Paul Cohen’s book is readable, humane, thought-provoking and important. It speaks to historians, no matter what their specialised field, by drawing out broad themes around story-telling, memory, myth-making and historical practice. These are now well-discussed areas in our discipline and beyond. Cohen brings something especially precious to them—his elegant, clear writing, his wide knowledge (which is rooted in the study of China) and his ability to show in satisfying detail how stories work. Over five chapters, he focuses on specific tales showing how they have been deployed for a variety of purposes at different times, culminating in twentieth-century crises. His examples are both diverse and compelling: the battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Fall of Masada in 73 AD, the story of King Goujian who reigned over Yue between 496 and 465 BC, Joan of Arc who was burned in 1431, the heroism of Alexander Nevsky, a thirteenth-century Russian Prince, and Henry V, with his victory at Agincourt in 1415. In each case, Cohen dwells on specific retellings of the original figures and events, and shows how they were used, that is, re-presented, by later individuals, groups and factions. His principal aim is to show the ways in which people over the twentieth century turned to these stories in ‘moments of crisis’. They were able to do so because, as he puts it in the Preface, there was ‘resonance or reverberation between story and situation, between a narrative and a contemporary historical condition that prompted those living with it to attach special meaning to that narrative’ (p. xi). The links between his chosen narratives and the settings in which they were mobilised are subtly delineated, so that there is no danger of readers taking away a sense of simple ‘misuse’ or of the crude simplification of historical ‘truth’ by interested parties. Cohen does not deny that such retold stories serve instrumental ends, as is clear from Winston Churchill’s involvement with Laurence Olivier’s film Henry V (1944). But he takes the arguments further and probes the impulses that spawned renewed engagement with old tales, showing notable sensitivity in the process. And he is perfectly explicit about the slender evidence upon which many such accounts rest. Cohen also points out how stories lose their immediacy when circumstances change—as happened in Israel, where, from around the 1970s, the Battle of Masada lost its symbolic and mythic resonances

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Extant taxon · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Victory · Classics · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration