Resources of actual events

Published 6:00 am Sunday, September 11, 2016

Read Life and Time as it published history in 1942

Before public opinion or new generations began questioning whether it was true, the Holocaust happened. The World Trade Center fell 15 years ago today, Sept. 11, 2001, because a small band of lawless people flew their planes into the Twin Towers. Once again, America went to war.

The president and Congress were in agreement. Something had to be done to defend the people of the United States.

Whose opinions are these statements? Anyone who was an adult and witnessed the destruction and aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks that killed more than 3,000 people. They watched televised live reports with news and spectator videos 24/7 on some news channels, early social media and — read magazines.

That was before pictures became overwhelming and the images of that day were censored from the public.

In today’s political climate with volumes of edited reports and opinions racing at the speed of technology, history can easily be altered to fit someone’s political agenda or personal opinions. Not so when seekers of truth resource the very materials that reported the news as it happened.

Amy Alleman is the acquisitions librarian at Iberia Parish Library. She just celebrated 31 years of employment in a job she finds satisfying and interesting. Why not? She is also in charge of the volumes of original archival magazines stored at the Main Branch.

What Can We Learn?

The magazine archive was discovered during a routine trip to the library’s second floor to select Photos From The Past for the Wednesday edition of The Daily Iberian. Row after row of well-worn magazines sit idle without wide-spread knowledge of their existence.

Alleman said few people are aware of them, but for the most part, they sit collecting dust as students and history buffs search the electronic images and text of the internet. As school starts this September, the time seemed right to remind interested people of the history reported by seasoned veterans of journalism.

These are the types of archives writers and modern news commentators draw from but they are just as available to the average resident of the Teche Area. For students trying to understand the past and how it affects the present and their futures, several quotes are worth repeating about the study of history.

Author Ray Bradbury wrote a controversial novel in 1953 that speaks of images today with a quote that can be isolated from the internet.

“We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering,” Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451. “That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And someday we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest god – – – – steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.”

Obviously, this oft-reported prophetic comment has not occurred but the hole that was left as a grave for many at the Twin Towers sight came close to fulfilling the view 48 years after it was written.

Weighing In On History

Recounting the times and the impact history has on the culture and the world has created inspiration as well as criticism. January 2011, the C.S. Lewis Institute wrote this about history.

“Here, no doubt, we ask a question to which human beings cannot give an answer with any certainty … and out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history — money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery — the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine.

“A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

“That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended — civilizations are built up — excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice.”

This Lewis commentary on history is neither right or wrong, rather a philosophical statement made by Lewis and believed like him. To take Lewis’ quotes without understanding the context of his life as a well known British novelist, poet, academic, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist — or the culture of his worldview, does not make it true or false. History must be preserved.

Recording the actual events in history cannot be better told than by those who experience them. Reporters, journalists and historians are the people we look to for clarity in times when events like Sept. 11 happen that we cannot understand.

The right to say, print or publish such opinions is given through the same freedoms that also allow someone to burn the very symbol that causes other U.S. citizens to stand up and fight — the American flag.

The Flag That Flew

Tonight on the History Channel, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, author of “Silencing the Past,” plans to chronicle the journey of “America’s 9/11 Flag: Rise from the Ashes.” It will air at 9:30 p.m.

A flag whose picture became so famous after its raising on the pile of rubble left by the Twin Towers, became a symbol of American resolve similar to the one raised on Iwo Jima during World War II.

The flag was quickly forgotten after 9/11 until the publication of a photo taken by Thomas E. Franklin, a photojournalist for The Bergen Record in New Jersey. By the time the image hit newsstands, the flag had been taken down.

A substitute was used as the real thing, but not until Trouillot found the original, was the significance of investigation of history fully revealed.

“Dust from ground zero is a fingerprint,” Trouillot said. “To recreate the dust of 9/11 you have to recreate 9/11.”

The dust collecting on the magazines housed in the Iberia Parish Library holds a fingerprint, too, the history of our world. Discovery is waiting for the hand that will hold the past in preparation of tomorrow’s future.

The library is rich with adventures, entertaining activities with helpful resources for exploring the world — past, present and future. Drop by and expand your world.