In the nationwide survey of nearly 1,500 people, 91 percent of respondents said they’d looked at photographs with family or friends and 83 percent said they’d taken a photograph—in the past year. If the survey were repeated today, those numbers would almost certainly be even higher. I know I’ve snapped dozens of pictures in the last week alone, most of them of my ridiculously cute puppy. Thanks to the ubiquity of high-quality smartphone cameras, cheap digital storage, and social media, we’re all taking and sharing photos all the time—last night’s Instagram-worthy dessert; a selfie with your bestie; the spot where you parked your car.
So are all of these captured moments, these personal memories, a part of history? That depends on how you define history.
For Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, two of the historians who led the 1995 survey, the very idea of history was in flux. At the time, pundits were criticizing Americans’ ignorance of past events, and professional historians were wringing their hands about the public’s historical illiteracy.
Instead of focusing on what people didn’t know, Rosenzweig and Thelen set out to quantify how people thought about the past. They published their results in the 1998 book The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (Columbia University Press). This groundbreaking study was heralded by historians, those working within academic settings as well as those working in museums and other public-facing institutions, because it helped them to think about the public’s understanding of their field.
Little did Rosenzweig and Thelen know that the entire discipline of history was about to be disrupted by a whole host of technologies. The digital camera was just the beginning.
For example, a little over a third of the survey’s respondents said they had researched their family history or worked on a family tree. That kind of activity got a whole lot easier the following year, when Paul Brent Allen and Dan Taggart launched Ancestry.com, which is now one of the largest online genealogical databases, with 3 million subscribers and approximately 10 billion records. Researching your family tree no longer means poring over documents in the local library.
Similarly, when the survey was conducted, the Human Genome Project was still years away from mapping our DNA. Today, at-home DNA kits make it simple for anyone to order up their genetic profile. In the process, family secrets and unknown branches on those family trees are revealed, complicating the histories that families might tell about themselves.