Thompson’s discussion of hindsight bias in individuals is interesting from a public history perspective and thinking about how a society constructs and preserves its collective memory, and about accusations of historical revisionism. Thompson observed: “Even when we’re able to remember and event, it’s not clear we’re remembering it correctly. Memory isn’t passive, it’s active” (Thompson, 26.) Though Thompson was writing about individual memory revision, this is also a process reflected in groups when it comes time to memorialize a past event. “Official” memory is actively constructed in the present and influenced by social and political groups. I was reminded of the controversies surrounding the first attempts by some American museums/historic sites to incorporate narratives of slavery into exhibits and programs, as well as the challenges of memorializing events like the Oklahoma City bombing and September 11th attacks.

In the 1990s, the new U.S. History Standards for public schools outraged conservatives like Lynne Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. Historian Gary Nash helped to develop the new standards, and they accused historians like Nash of revising American history. They argued that any narrative that wasn’t pro-American was simply a distortion of true American history. Around the same time, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum was developing an Enola Gay exhibit. As was the case with the history standards, the American public could not agree on one interpretation for the Enola Gay and its role in history. This symbol held different memories and different meaning for everyone. Some individuals and groups, particularly veterans groups, could not and refused to understand how anyone could possibly have negative memories associated with this plane: it brought a swift end to a long war and saved more soldiers’ lives by avoiding a U.S. invasion of Japan. They could not understand how anyone could have any bad memories associated with this plane. They accused the exhibit developers of engaging in historical revisionism, bent on discrediting the U.S. and destroying American history and demanded that this “liberal” angle not be included in the exhibit.

Others could not understand how or why these individuals refused to acknowledge that this plane did indeed cause a lot of harm when it dropped the nuclear bomb. Ultimately the entire planned exhibition was stripped bare and the plane was displayed with little interpretation. The negative memories associated with the plane were forced out of the museum’s planned interpretation of the object. It has been debated if the public lost out as a result of this, and I think that something was lost when all of the individual meanings associated with the plane were not able to be publicly acknowledged and explored. (History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past by Edward Linenthal provides a great discussion of these types of controversies in public memory.) The “malleability of memory” (Thompson, 27) is certainly seen in the development of museum exhibitions and programs, especially when attempting to memorialize a traumatic or tragic event and sometimes things are deliberately left out to create a new official memory.

Shifting gears – I found Cox’s argument that archivists need to do more outreach to the general public appealing. For many decades, archival and museum collections focused on documents and objects connected to the elite or more prominent members of society. This has certainly changed, as objects and documents concerning other groups and individuals that were not considered important before are being granted more consideration. Archivists could teach the general public a great deal about properly preserving and interpreting their own personal collections. With individuals taking the basic preservation of personal archives into their own hands in their homes, future archivists and historians would ultimately benefit.

Personal archives in digital format are important to the general public today, and there should be no reason why archivists should not take these types of personal archives seriously because they are, as Thompson says, significant and meaningful to the individual “even if it sometimes happens to be wrong” (Thompson, 24.) Individuals obviously have an interest in preserving materials deemed important to them, as is evidenced by the deluge of social media platforms. There are always new apps encouraging individuals to publicly record quite literally every part of their daily lives. Individuals now effortlessly live blog what would have previously been rather personal information. These “corps of citizen archivists” (Cox, 64) almost cannot resist the impulse to publicly archive every part of their day and share all information about their lives with both friends and total strangers. This epitomizes how the private has become very public by means of these types of digital personal archives, and raises a lot of questions about privacy now and in the near future.