Most people entered the world not in hospital delivery rooms but in the family home by the light of a kerosene lamp. Most were raised on remote farms on the plains and in the Far West, where they played with imaginary friends, socialized during weekend visits to town, and received their formal education from their parents. Over the past few centuries humanity has witnessed the most dramatic and rapid cultural transformations ever known. So great, in fact, has this rate become that each generation now alive absorbs within its lifetime an amount of technological and social change that traditionally occurred over the course of many centuries. Santayana Whoever controls the past controls the future.
History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
The nature of collective memory and the processes of historical revisionism have intrigued me for some time. For instance, consider the proposition that it is at the age of nine when a public event creates a lasting impression on a person's memory. Through their museums, monuments , historic districts, and street names, cities commemorate their heroes and preserve memories of their collective pasts. Destroyed were old buildings which told us who we are, what we've been through, what we are apprised or allowed. They are a tangible record of our existence as a people.