This is a conversation with Susan A. Crane, author of the book “Nothing Happened: A History“
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Topics Discussed:
- How do people think of the past?
- What does Nothing even mean?
- Four expressions of historical consciousness:
1- Nothing Happened
2- Nothing is the Way it Was
3- Nothing has Changed
4- Nothing is Left
- How far away does the past have to be before being considered the past?
- What the past says about the present
- The examples of Germany, Chile, the USA, Spain and Lebanon
- When histories become ruin
- On biographies and ‘great men’
- On ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ in history
Resources mentioned:
Recommended Books
- In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale
- The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny by Susan Lepselter
- Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman
- A History of Silence: From the Renaissance to the Present Day by Alain Corbin