The Concept of Historical Consciousness as an Interpretive Frame for Historical Media
Introduction
This paper presents an outline for how the concept of historical consciousness can be understood regarding (i) its definition, application, and qualitiative character, (ii) its relation to other history didactical concepts (i.e.
‘historical culture’ and ‘historical use’), (iii) its development, (iv) its significance, and, finally, how an aggregated understanding of the concept can be used as an interpretive frame for historical media. The paper will not present any new ideas on how to understand or approach the concept, but rather a selection of theoretical approaches that can be found in history didactical research. Given the rather limited space in this paper, some of the presentations will be shorter than others.
‘Historical Consciousness’ – Its Definition, Application and Qualitative Character
Below follows a brief presentation of one way to describe the concept of historical consciousness. I regard the concept to be essentially a history didactical one, and the following presentation will focus on historical consciousness as an ability that everyone possesses and that can be improved in an individual, and, consequently, something that individuals can have to a higher or lesser degree. This is a controversial interpretation1, and this will be discussed in more detail in the sub-section below called ‘Qualitative Character.’
Definition
In 1979 the German historian Karl-Ernst Jeismann presented four aspects of definitions of historical consciousness, and his second one which states that
‘[h]istorical consciousness incorporates the connection between interpretation of the past, understanding of the present, and perspective on the future’2 has become the generally accepted one in Swedish history
1 Cf. Ulrika Holgersson and Cecilia Persson, ‘Rätten Att Skriva Människan. Historiemedvetande Och Berättelse Som Problematiska Begrepp: Svar till Bernard Eric Jensen’, in Historisk Tidskrift, vol. 122:4 (Historisk tidskrift Svenska historiska föreningen, 2002), 638–639; and Peter Seixas, ‘Introduction’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 9.
2 Karl-Ernst Jeissman, ‘Geschichtsbewusstsein’, in Handbuch Der Geschichtsdidaktik, ed. Klaus Bergmann et al., vol. 1 (Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1979), 40–42.
didactics.3 Thus, historical consciousness is an ability to create connections between past, present, and future in an individual. Niklas Ammert has dubbed this ability ‘multichronology.’4 This is the most basic and general definition of the concept that will be used in this paper.
Application
Of imperative significance for how the concept of historical consciousness is to be understood is the manner in which it is applied. There is a variety of applications in the research that uses the concept5, but the view presented in this paper focuses on historical consciousness as an ability to create meaning in life in general and history in particular. Hence, historical consciousness is applied as a concept that creates and establishes meaning in an individual’s life through multichronological connections.6 Using this application of the concept, a person by her use of historical consciousness manages to understand the underlying conditions for her life and that there are historical reasons to why the contemporary world is constituted the way it is.7 A person’s historical consciousness is made visible when she creates meaning and understanding in her life8, and, consequently, it is through this meaning creating practice or use of history that we encounter an individual’s historical consciousness.
This application also lends itself to explaining how a person’s historical consciousness is instrumental in creating meaning in history itself; our historical consciousness enables us to see patterns in history, instead of just an infinite number of historical events and people. That one historical event follows another one with a certain amount of necessity (real or imagined) is
3 Robert Thorp, ‘The Concept of Historical Consciousness in Swedish History Didactical Research’, in Yearbook (of the International Society for History Didactics), ed. Joanna Wojdon (Schwalbach:
Wochenschau Verlag, 2013), 6.
4 Niklas Ammert, Det Osamtidigas Samtidighet: Historiemedvetande i Svenska Historieläroböcker Under Hundra År (Uppsala: Sisyfos, 2008), 56.
5 For some examples, see Thorp, ‘The Concept of Historical Consciousness in Swedish History Didactical Research’, 7–12.
6 Cf. Peter Aronsson, ‘Historiekultur, Politik Och Historievetenskap i Norden’, Historisk Tidskrift 122, no. 2 (June 6, 2002): 189–190; Peter Aronsson, Historiebruk: Att Använda Det Förflutna (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2004), 67; Lars Andersson Hult, Att Finna Meningen i Ett Historieprov: En Studie Om Mer Eller Mindre Utvecklat Historiemedvetande (Lund: Forskarskolan i historia och historiedidaktik, Lunds universitet, 2012), 26; and Klas-Göran Karlsson, Med Folkmord i Fokus: Förintelsens Plats i Den Europeiska Historiekulturen, Skriftserie/Forum För Levande Historia, 1653-5332; 6 (Stockholm: Forum för levande historia, 2008), 7.
7 Nanny Hartsmar, Historiemedvetande: Elevers Tidsförståelse i En Skolkontext, Studia Psychologica Et Paedagogica. Series Altera, 0346-5926; 155 (Malmö: Institutionen för pedagogik, Lärarhögsk., 2001), 79.
8 Cf. Kerstin Berntsson, Spelar Släkten Någon Roll?: ‘Den Lilla Historien’ Och Elevers Historiemedvetande (Lund: Forskarskolan i historia och historiedidaktik, Lunds universitet, 2012), 19; and Klas-Göran Karlsson,
‘Förintelsen Som Historiekulturellt Fenomen - En Översikt’, in Historisk Tidskrift, vol. 125:4, s. 721–733 (Historisk tidskrift Svenska Historiska Föreningen, 2005), 722.
possible because a person possesses a historical consciousness and applies it to create meaning in history.9
Qualitative Character
The final important component of historical consciousness as a history didactical concept is its qualitative character: people can have historical consciousnesses of a higher or lesser degree. Jörn Rüsen’s typology of historical consciousness is a convenient way to explain the different characteristics that a historical consciousness can have, and the hierarchy between the different types of historical consciousness. The most basic kind of historical consciousness is the ‘traditional’ one: history is full of repetition and all members of society are supposed to uphold what tradtition dictates.
The next kind is the ‘exemplary’ one, and here history is still static, but also generates normative rules about how a person should lead her life (historia magistra vitae). The third kind is called a ‘critical’ historical consciousness and a person that possesses a critical historical consciousness uses history as a way of criticising contemporary society and culture. The final, and most advanced, type of historical consciousness is the ‘genetic’ one, and this type lends an ability to historicise past and present societies and cultures by explaining continuity and change through the use of history.10
As I noted above, there has been some controversy about this way of perceiving a historical consciousness; this has been criticised as a Eurocentric way of perceiving individuals. The Canadian historian Peter Seixas argues, for instance, that with this understanding of the concept of historical consciousness, the more rational and secular a person you are, the higher you will ‘score’ in Rüsen’s typology, and that Western societies, generally speaking, are the ones that are the most rational and secular.11 I would like to argue that this criticism is deficient in two ways: firstly, it rests on the assumption that Western societies are different in kind than non- Western ones, and, secondly, that an ability to historicise society and culture is incompatible with a non-secular world view.
It could instead be proposed that Western and non-Western societies consist of individuals that have historical consciousnesses to varying degrees: there are certainly Westerners with a traditional type of historical consciousness, and there are also non-Westerners that possess the genetic
9 Cf. Martin Alm, Americanitis: Amerika Som Sjukdom Eller Läkemedel: Svenska Berättelser Om USA Åren 1900-1939, Studia Historica Lundensia, 1650-755X; 10 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2002), 21–22; and Åsa Linderborg, Socialdemokraterna Skriver Historia: Historieskrivning Som Ideologisk Maktresurs 1892- 2000, Atlas Akademi, 99-3423719-9 (Stockholm: Atlas, 2001), 33.
10 Jörn Rüsen, ‘Historical Consciousness: Narrative, Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 72.
11 Seixas, ‘Introduction’, 9.
type of the concept. It is a matter of who you are and how you perceive the world, not where you happen to live. Furthermore, being able to appreciate continuity and change in history and contemporary society (as Rüsen’s fourth and most advanced type states) is an ability that harmonises well with a religious way of perceiving the world: to understand that historical persons and societies have had differing ways of perceiving the world can hardly be challenging to a Christian or Muslim world view, for instance. It is also possible to imagine people being secular and rational and still viewing history as static and full of examples of how we should lead our lives. Finally, it is not at all given that the fourth type of historical consciousness is a better type than the first one, it is only more advanced.
Summary and Synthesis
Hence, an aggregated definition of the concept of historical consciousness would look something like this: it is an individual ability to create meaning in life and history through multichronological connections that everyone possesses (consciously or not) and there are four different types of historical consciousness that are qualitatively different in character. I would like to stress that this understanding of the concept makes it an individual one: in order to have a historical consciousness you have to be an individual that constructs meaning in your life. Thus, societies cannot possess a historical consciousness, only its human members.
‘Historical Consciousness’ – Its Relation to Other History Didactical Concepts
The aim of this section is to theoretically locate ‘historical consciousness’ in relation to the other key history didactical concepts of ‘historical culture’ and
‘historical use.’ To achieve this aim, I will briefly define the two latter concepts and describe their relation to the concept of historical consciousness.
Historical Culture
If the analysis presented above limits historical consciousness to meaning- making individuals, ‘historical culture’ becomes the concept that most conveniently deals with how historical meaning is constructed and maintained on a societal level. The Swedish historian Peter Aronsson writes that historical culture is ‘the artefacts, rituals, customs, and assertions with reference to the past that offer manifest possibilities to connect the relation
between past, present, and future.’12 Although this quotation does not explicitly state that ‘historical culture’ is a societal and not individual concept, one could argue that cultural artefacts, ritual, customs and assertions are implicitly societal in character since they are present in society regardless of its individual members. With ‘regardless’ I mean that the cultural components of a given society is present in that society when an individual member is born into or otherwise enters it, but that this individual member later on can influence the historical culture of the same society to a certain degree. Historical culture is thus a dynamic concept that shapes individuals’ historical consciousnesses.13
Consequently, it can be asserted that ‘historical culture’ is the societal historical landscape that individuals are born into. A society’s historical culture thus a priori affects how individuals interpret historical events or facts.14 For instance, almost all members of Western societies regard Adolf Hitler as a historical villain regardless of what they know about him or his actions, and this is not necessarily the same case in other historical cultures.15
This view of the concept claims that no person meets history from a neutral position; all historical knowledge is ‘pre-interpreted’ by the historical culture that is dominant in the society in which the individual is born or lives. This does not necessarily mean that all individuals automatically adopt the societal historical culture, but they do have to relate to it, and a historical culture can be seen as a pre-requisite for a historical consciousness: without it individuals would have no means to express their views on history.16 Furthermore, it should be noted that a historical culture is always a matter of negotiation and that it is, as stated above, dynamic. It is also important to underline the fact that it might be misleading to talk about ‘historical culture’
in the singular case, since most societies are historically multi-cultural, meaning that there in a society are various and competing historical cultures and ways of interpreting history.17
12 Aronsson, ‘Historiekultur, Politik Och Historievetenskap i Norden’, 189.
13 For a similar approach, see Karlsson, ‘Förintelsen Som Historiekulturellt Fenomen - En Översikt’, 724.
14 Cf. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology &
Existential Philosophy, 0550-0060 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), 50–53; and Karlsson, Med Folkmord i Fokus, 11.
15 For an example of this, see Ylva Edenhall, ‘Hitler Eftertraktat Varumärke i Indien’, SvD.se, December 13, 2012, http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/nyheter/varlden/hitler-eftertraktat-varumarke-i-indien_7752902.svd.
16 Cf. Kenneth Nordgren, Vems Är Historien?: Historia Som Medvetande, Kultur Och Handling i Det Mångkulturella Sverige, Doktorsavhandlingar Inom Den Nationella Forskarskolan i Pedagogiskt Arbete, 1653-6894; 3 (Umeå: Fakultetsnämnden för lärarutbildning, Umeå universitet, 2006), 19, 26.
17 See Igor Potapenko, Historiemedvetande Och Identitet: Om Historiens Närvaro i Några Estniska Ungdomars Liv (Stockholm: Institutionen för didaktik och pedagogiskt arbete, Stockholms universitet, 2010), 227–229, for a more thorough discussion of this.
Historical Use
When an individual makes use of the historical knowledge she has or uses history to achieve various things, it is generally said that she portrays
‘historical use,’ and there are a number of different historical uses and categorisations of them.18 Of importance to the argument presented in this paper is what relation the concepts of historical use and historical consciousness have to each other, and according to the view presented here an individual expresses her historical consciousness when she uses history for various purposes. This means that it is through an individual’s historical use that we can access her historical consciousness.19 In the section below called ‘Historical Consciousness – an Interpretive Frame for Historical Media’ it will be discussed in greater detail how different historical uses can be seen as symptoms of an individual’s historical consciousness.
‘Historical Consciousness’ – Its Development
Since historical consciousness is primarily a history didactical concept, it is presumed that a historical consciousness is a dynamic entity that can be developed. For this reason, it is very important from a didactical perspective to theoretically specify how this development takes place. In what in Sweden is generally called the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ history didactical tradition, historical cognition has traditionally been in focus and in this tradition the concept of
‘historical thinking’ is widely used to theoretically illustrate how an individual’s historical knowledge can be developed.20 Some researchers have suggested that there is a link between historical consciousness and historical thinking21, and this is something this section of the paper seeks to affirm.
18 Cf. Klas-Göran Karlsson, Historia Som Vapen: Historiebruk Och Sovjetunionens Upplösning 1985-1995 (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1999), 55–60.
19 See Bernard Eric Jensen, ‘Historiemedvetande - Begreppsanalys, Samhällsteori, Didaktik’, in Historiedidaktik, ed. Christer Karlegärd and Klas-Göran Karlsson (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1997), 44–46;
and Nordgren, Vems Är Historien?, 38, for similar approaches.
20 Cf. Per Eliasson, ‘Vilken Historia!? | Nationalencyklopedin’, September 6, 2012,
http://www.ne.se/rep/vilken-historia; and Vanja Lozic, Historieundervisningens Utmaningar:
Historiedidaktik För 2000-talet (Malmö: Gleerups, 2011), 21.
21 Cf. Maria de Laval, Det Känns Inte Längre Som Det Var Länge Sedan: En Undersökning Av Gymnasieelevers Historiska Tänkande (Lund: Forskarskolan i historia och historiedidaktik, Lunds universitet, 2011), 23–24; and Hans Olofsson, Fatta Historia: En Explorativ Fallstudie Om Historieundervisning Och Historiebruk i En Högstadieklass (Karlstad: Fakulteten för samhälls- och livsvetenskaper, Historia, Karlstads universitet, 2011), 30–38.
Historical Thinking
Although ‘historical thinking’ seems a complex and somewhat ambiguous concept22 (much like the concept of historical consciousness), there seems to be some features that are essential: it is an ability to understand how historical knowledge has been constructed and to know what that means, and an ability to contextualise historical facts, events and persons.23 The Canadian historian Stéphane Lévesque differentiates between two different ways of understanding history: ‘memory-history’ and ‘disciplinary history.’
Memory-history is characterised as a way of understanding history as a matter of transmitting historical knowledge, how this historical knowledge came to be is not of importance with this view. Disciplinary history, on the other hand, is preoccupied with this question since it determines the value of the historical knowledge at hand. Memory-history can be interpreted as a kind of substantive knowledge: the facts themselves are in focus, whereas disciplinary history is more a matter of procedural knowledge: how did the substantive knowledge come to exist in the first place and what does that mean?24 To develop a historical thinking the latter view on history and historical knowledge is essential.
To obtain a kind of historical thinking an individual has to learn to think like a historian, i.e. to learn to apply theoretical tools to analyse how historical knowledge is constructed. These tools are historical significance, continuity and change, progress and decline, evidence, and historical empathy.25 A historian needs to be able to explain why historical events or knowledge are significant, she has to be able account for continuity and change and progress and decline, she has to be able to scrutinise historical evidence, and, finally, she has to have what is called historical empathy.
Historical empathy is best described as an ability to contextualise things past and present, and to understand what that means, in other words to appreciate how historical societies and historical people differed from present day societies and people.26
A possible link to the concept of historical consciousness can be Rüsen’s typology that was presented above. The ‘traditional’ and ‘exemplary’ types of
22 Cf. Stéphane Lévesque, Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-first Century (Toronto:
Buffalo, 2008), 10; and Catherine Duquette, Le Rapport Entre La Pensée Historique Et La Conscience Historique. Elaboration D’une Modèle D’interprétation Lors De L’apprentissage De L’histoire Chez Les Élèves De Cinquième Secondaire Des Écoles Francophone Du Québec (Québec: Université de Laval, 2011), 20.
23 Cf. Lévesque, Thinking Historically, 27; and Samuel S. Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 110.
24 Lévesque, Thinking Historically, 7–9, 37.
25 Ibid., 17.
26 Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, 23–24, 110.
historical consciousness in Rüsen’s typology, correspond quite well with what Lévesque calls memory-history: historical knowledge is static and epistemologically ‘unproblematic;’ history and historical consciousness is about learning facts and applying them. A ‘critical’ historical consciousness differs from a ‘traditional’ and ‘exemplary’ one, in that it uses history to scrutinise society and culture, and this resembles a more disciplinary approach to history, although it does not have to be procedural in kind. You can criticise society and culture by using history without being able to apply source criticism, for instance. A ‘genetic’ historical consciousness, however, seems to require a kind of historical thinking that is both disciplinary and procedural in character; Lévesque writes about historical empathy (what I perceive to be the most important element of historical thinking) that:
[students] should not only employ standards to judge events or cases applicable to the whole period but also avoid imposing such standards anachronistically on past actors [...]
to create ‘straw men’ or make history support present-day claims of progress. This step is more complex and challenging because it requires that students recreate the sequence of events so as to mentally see – to imagine – whether the standards they employ were recognized and valued by predecessors as well. This empathetic task demands that students use their historical imaginations and contextualize their sources.27
This seems to be quite close to the requirement that Rüsen presents for a genetic historical consciousness: to be able to contextualise past and present societies and cultures. In order to not impose our contemporary standards on history, we need to be aware of the standards we possess ourselves. In other words, we should have an awareness of the exoticism of history and a critical assessment of the normalcy of contemporary society and culture. If the individual does not possess this ability, she will only project her own unreflected beliefs onto history, with the result that history is perceived as a status quo, and that historical agents are ‘lesser’ beings for not understanding what was going to happen. Hence, the individual will not be able to contextualise, and will not gain historical empathy or a genetic historical consciousness.
‘Historical Consciousness’ – Its Significance
In Swedish history didactical research that uses the concept of historical consciousness, it is often asserted that the concept is an important one because it develops an individual’s identity.28 Furthermore, it is held that it is through narratives that an individual’s historical consciousness develops
27 Lévesque, Thinking Historically, 109–110.
28 For two examples, see Nordgren, Vems Är Historien?, 36; and Klas-Göran Karlsson, ‘Historiedidaktik:
Begrepp, Teori Och Analys’, in Historien Är Nu: En Introduktion till Historiedidaktiken, ed. Ulf Zander and Klas-Göran Karlsson (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009), 52.
her identity.29 This section will present the ‘Narrative Self-Constitution View’
on identities and their formation, a theory that might manage to explain the links between historical consciousness, narrative, and identity, and thus show why historical consciousness is an existentially important concept.
The Narrative Self-Constitution View
The American philosopher Marya Schechtman writes that:
[a]ccording to the narrative self-constitution view, the differences between persons and other individuals (I use the word “individual” to refer to any sentient creature) lies in how they organize their experiences, and hence their lives. At the core of this view is the assertion that individuals constitute themselves as persons by coming to think of themselves as persisting subjects who have had experience in the past and will continue to have experience in the future, taking certain experiences as theirs.30
Hence, it is through the narratives we create about ourselves and the world around us that we become individuals with identities. We organise our experiences differently, and that is what makes us individual. It is through our ability to perceive ourselves as temporally persisting subjects that have experiences that we gain personhood. What I did yesterday affects who I am today, and what I do today will influence who I am tomorrow, i.e. a multichronological understanding of the self. In order to make these temporal connections, we need narratives about ourselves to make us feel that our lives make sense, that what we have experienced and will experience unfolds in a logical manner. Furthermore, our narratives functions as a type of lens through which we filter experiences, actions and plans, and it is only the entities that make sense and are conceptualised in our narratives that we incorporate, the rest is filtered away.31 From a history didactical perspective, this could be interesting and challenging: what does not fit in to people’s narratives, they will forget, and in order to make history affect people’s historical consciousnesses and identities it has to address the narratives that people have about history and themselves.
Thus, the narrative self-constitution view affords a theoretical approach that can explain the connections between the concepts of historical consciousness and identity, rendering historical consciousness a highly significant concept in history didactics.
29 Cf. Berntsson, Spelar Släkten Någon Roll?, 24–25; Igor Potapenko, Elevens Egen Historia Och Skolans Historieundervisning: Historiemedvetande Och Identitet Hos Några Ungdomar Från Forna Jugoslavien, GEM Rapport, 1652-0572; 4 (Stockholm: Lärarhögskolan i Stockholm, 2006), 38; and Rüsen, ‘Historical Consciousness: Narrative, Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development’, 67.
30 Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), 94.
31 Ibid., 113–114.
‘Historical Consciousness’ – an Interpretive Frame for Historical media
This last section will argue for how we can understand the concept as an interpretive frame for historical media (I use the term ‘historical media’ in the broadest sense, meaning anything that conveys something historical).
This will be done by synthesising the previous perspectives that have been dealt with. In the first section it was established that a historical consciousness is an ability to create meaning through multichronological connections all individuals possess. There are also four qualitatively different types of historical consciousness. In the second section, it was claimed that a historical consciousness relates to the concepts of historical culture and historial use in the sense that a historical culture determines how history is perceived and interpreted in any given society, and that an individual expresses her historical consciousness through her historical use. The third section highlighted how the concept of historical thinking can help explain how historical knowledge is constructed, and how a historical consciousness is developed. The fourth section, then, presented the narrative self- constitution view in order to theoretically explain the history didactally significant link between a historical consciousness and an individual’s identity. This last section will then attempt to connect these perspectives.
It has been asserted that the meaning of historical media is always determined by who experiences it, where she experiences it, and when she experiences it, i.e. the context of the medium determines its meaning.32 It could therefore be claimed that there is a tension concerning the construction of meaning in historical media: the authors or creators of the media wish to convey one message through them, while the recipients of the media have their interpretations and understandings of the same media. If we return to the concepts of historical consciousness, historical culture, and historical use, it can be claimed that the historical use of creating historial media is determined by the contemporary society’s historical culture and the author’s historical consciousness, but that its meaning also is contingent on the historical culture of the recipient’s contemporary society and her historical consciousness, and that this affects how the historical media can be used as a bearer of historical meaning. With this line of reasoning, the most basic concept is historical consciousness since it is the personal interpretation of meaning that determines the meaning of the historical media.
32 Cf. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 154; Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, ed. Todd Samuel Presner, Cultural Memory in the Present, 99-2896218-9 (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 325–326; and Magnus Rodell, ‘Fallna Svenskar Och Fortifikationer i Vildmarken: Om Det Ryska Hotet Och Medielandskapet Kring 1900’, in Berättande i Olika Medier, ed. Leif Dahlberg and Pelle Snickars, vol. S. 79–115 (Berättande i olika medier 2008, 2008), 86–87.
Since we can only encounter an individual’s historical consciousness through her historical use, it becomes difficult to claim that historical media can possess a historical consciousness. They can portray the historical consciousness of their authors (through the author’s historical use) and they can influence an individual’s historical consciousness through historical thinking; a rudimentary historical thinking will result in a traditional historical consciousness and a fully developed historical thinking will result in a genetic historical consciousness. Regarding historical media’s ability to influence a person’s historical consciousness, it has been shown that historical media portraying values (such as ‘freedom’ or ‘benevolence’) are more successful in affecting a historical consciousness than media that only present historial facts.33 And, finally, if the historical media has influenced the personal narratives of the recipients, the identities of the recipients will have been affected by their historical consciousnesses.
Conclusion
As the argument presented in this paper hopefully has shown, historical consciousness is a complex concept that needs quite a bit of tinkering with to become theoretically versatile. However, if the concept is theoretically specified it can afford many interesting perspectives on the construction of historical meaning (both on an individual and societal level), the development of historical knowledge and thinking, the influence of history on the construction of personal identities, and how meaning in historical media can be analysed from different perspectives. This is quite a lot from a history didactical perspective.
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