For nearly a decade I have been putting up web sites, chiefly about topics in Jamaican history. Day after day, as I continue to explore Jamaica's history especially, though not exclusively, in the period between 1865 and 1944, I find many aspects of that history that seem to have disappeared - to have been erased, overlooked, forgotten, and even rejected.

I am trying, in the web sites I am creating, to provide at least a glimpse of a more extensive view of Jamaica's past than the somewhat blinkered and stereotypical view which has become all too commonly accepted in the last half century.

'Given the strange power of Jamaica to erase its history . . . '

Jean D'Costa and Barbara Lalla in the Introduction to Voices in Exile, 1989

 

Some thoughts on 'history':

'Written history is . . . the fragmentary record of the often inexplicable actions of innumerable bewildered human beings, set down and interpreted according to their own limitations by other human  beings, equally bewildered.'

Dame Veronica Wedgewood, historian

 

'All historical sciences rest upon inference, and evolution is no different from geology, cosmology, or human history in this respect. In principle, we cannot observe processes that operated in the past. We must infer them from results that still surround us: living and fossil organisms for evolution, documents and artifacts for human history, strata and topography for geology.'

Stephen Jay Gould, scientist

 

 
'Without knowledge of the past, the way into the thickets of the future is desperate and unclear.'

Lauren Eiseley, scientist

 

'The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.'
 
A. Whitney Brown, U S comedian


 

'I found out that those folks in the history books were real people. They didn't live in the past. They inhabited the present, their present, and it was filled with problems and stress and nastiness and decency and heroism – just as any time is.'

Joy Hakim, teacher, writer, historian
 

 

'People in the past acted not in response to the way historians - armed with hindsight and the technologies of the statistician - define that world, but in response to the way they deemed it to be.'

 


Peter McPhee, historian
 

'Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.'

H A L Fisher, historian

 

'The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.'

George Santayana, philosopher

 

'I no longer share historians' common anxiety to explain change and prefer, on the whole, merely to describe it. The question I most want to ask myself about the past is, 'What did it feel like to live in it?' Not even, 'What was it like?', because we have so few means of answering or, indeed, exploring that question.'
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, historian
 

 

 
 
 
 

 

 

  PLEASE ALERT ME TO ANY BROKEN LINKS!  

  jamaica.history(at)outlook(dot)com