Historical New York Time Project

One of the most notable sayings in history class is to learn history in order not to relive history. But as we live day-to-day, the history taught to us or that we read in books seems remote and detached, and it just doesn't appear to be very relevant in the sense of teaching us how to avoid reliving grim events of the past. Reading the history books and the articles that so carefully look back on events is often an empty experience simply because it is hard to know how the events actually did unfold in the minds of the very real people who were there at the time. Too often we think of those people as somehow "not like us" and we see ourselves as somehow "smarter and wiser" and they were. All too often we fail to appreciate how the mistakes were actually made or, conversely, how the great gains of history were actually seen at the time of their creation. History books and historical perspectives rarely convey such day-to-day realities in an effective way.

The Historical New York Times Project is the first of a series of projects undertaken by the Universal Library at Carnegie Mellon University, to provide everyone with a glimpse into the actual events as they were seen by the people of the day. You will see the rich tapestry of lives, so like ours today, in which now famous events were actually understood, and misunderstood. This teaches us that reliving history is more common than we would wish and that avoiding the reliving of history requires more vigilence than we might want. But knowledge is power, and we find this cotemporaneous form of historical knowledge among the most powerful forms of knowledge. It cannot supplant or replace the careful scholarship of our great historians, but it most certainly can complement it.

Site en Anglais
http://www.nyt.ulib.org

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Historical New York Times Project  lun 17 sep. 01