This is a conversation with Susan A. Crane, author of the book “Nothing Happened: A History“

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Topics Discussed:

• How do people think of the past?
• What does Nothing even mean?
• Four expressions of historical consciousness:
  1- Nothing Happened
  2- Nothing is the Way it Was
  3- Nothing has Changed
  4- Nothing is Left
• How far away does the past have to be before being considered the past?
• What the past says about the present
• The examples of Germany, Chile, the USA, Spain and Lebanon
• When histories become ruin
• On biographies and ‘great men’
• On ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ in history

Resources mentioned:

• Why Man Creates by Saul Bass
• The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and the Event. Form and Meaning in Oral History by Alessandro Portelli
• Nostalgia for the light by Patricio Guzmán
• History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige by Rea Tajiri
• The mnemonic imagination by Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering
• Why Did Ozu Cut To A Vase? by Nerdwriter

Recommended Books

• In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale
• The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny by Susan Lepselter
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman
• A History of Silence: From the Renaissance to the Present Day by Alain Corbin