this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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So the US has a nationwide history based competition called National History Day. If you haven't heard about it I suggest you look it up, it's basically science fair for history.
I mention it becuase for them to consider a historical event to be valid, it needs to have been at least 25 years after the event. 25 years is a long time, 9/11 will only just be valid next year. I'm pretty sure everyone looks at that event differently now then they did at the moment.
My point being that part of what makes history "History" is time, reflection, and a little bit of hindsight. How this event will be remembered will depend on what events come after and what Trumps legacy ends up being. I suspect it will be one looking at major international shifts caused by an untrustworthy US, but I may be wrong.
Yeah, this makes sense. I wasn’t exactly thinking about the impacts of current events on the future, and that playing into how things are remembered, but that’s a good point.
I think part of what I was getting at is that history is often blurred by memories of the events and the limited media and reporting that stood the test of time. A narrative will form and there will be limited amounts of stats that contradict it.
This aspect will be different going forward. The memory is less relevant since we have an overwhelming amount of media and reporting that lives on. And we also have massive amounts of first hand video footage that.
Maybe history will just be defined by who creates the best narrative out of this massive amount of data. And people will still ignore the contradicting evidence. It happens in real time anyway.
That's a good point that we now have a lot more information/recordings about events. It definitely makes history different. I wonder though if that will actually make the job of historians harder.
Does volume of content indicate what the majority thought/experienced or is there bias in what was saved/preserved?
Not to mention, who is paying to save/keep all of this content. We've found that the internet can remember forever, but doesn't necessarily remember everything (what would happen if YouTube shut down?).