Holger Hoock > Quotes

“Memory is social: people remember collectively, they remember publicly, and they remember interactively.”
― Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850

“For over two centuries, this topic has been subject to whitewashing and selective remembering and forgetting. While contemporaries experienced the Revolution as frightening, messy, and divisive, its pervasive violence and terror have since yielded to romanticized notions of the nation’s birth. In painting an unvarnished portrait of Revolutionary-era violence, we can shed new light on how participants understood their struggles and how survivors and subsequent generations have remembered and mis-remembered the conflict.”
― Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth