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13.Found Footage_ FTAA 920514 đź“Ľ.mp4

Found Footage FTAA 920514 đź“Ľ.srt

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This video took such a left turn it caught me off guard. I was expecting more warning messages, more wrong history when I popped it into the VCR. But this has such a different tone. It was somehow… comforting?

The case also had a photocopy of a news clipping tucked in with it. I took a photo and uploaded it here:

https://i.imgur.com/hfcLZYk.jpeg

I’ve been thinking about all this more and more - like, it’s getting to the point where I can’t get things done at work. I’ve defined myself and my identity as being an “historian” for so long, it’s hard to imagine what impact all this has on who I am.

Is history just a comfortable story we tell ourselves? It is a true story - whatever that means now - but a story nonetheless.

That gets me to “dangerous” thoughts, though. In my grad program, one prof always harped about not making history a “morality play.” We as historians were here to report our findings on the past. It wasn’t about assigning blame or drawing conclusions, just showing chains of causality and triangulating evidence. History was about finding truth.

Truth. There’s a word that I’m looking at differently.

Shakespeare is a morality play. The Great Gatsby and 1984 and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea are morality plays. Citizen Kane is a morality play. Just because they’re morality plays doesn’t invalidate them. There’s lots of truth in them, too, even though they’re all a form of fairy tale.

Is history just a fairy tale, too? If our whole understanding of the past can change when we find one little new scrap of evidence - is history really here to figure out what happened?

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