ABSTRACT

A very important resource for this book was the publication and website of the very impressive book Presence of the Past, which also helpfully placed online its survey and methodology (at https://chnm.gmu.edu/survey" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://chnm.gmu.edu/survey). Non-historians do not necessarily realize that just like science, methods and data in various aspects of history can be interrogated, verified and replicated. For example, in ‘Appendix 1, How We Did the Survey’ (available at: https://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/appendix.html" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/appendix.html), the authors noted:

This extensive piloting and pretesting taught us two crucial lessons. First, we needed to ask broadly framed questions if we were to learn what people were thinking and doing. That meant, in turn, that we had to ask people about ‘the past’ and not just about ‘history’. Our pilot survey showed that three quarters of those we interviewed thought of ‘the past’ and ‘history’ as different concepts, with most people defining the past in more inclusive terms and history as something more formal, analytical, official, or distant. As Melissa Keane, one of the Arizona graduate students, later observed, most people ‘drew a clear line between “history” and their own lives. “History” was often remote “book learning” – Columbus, Abe Lincoln, Henry VIII, the Norman Conquest – the “boring stuff from school”‘.