Memory challenges history, says Pulitzer Prize winner
Conflicts between personal memories and history help give insight into the past, said a Pulitzer Prize winner in Logan Tabernacle Thursday.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, an Idaho native and relative to the Logan Thatchers, was the featured speaker at the ninth annual Mormon history lecture, sponsored by Utah State University’s Special Collections and Archives. She is a professor at Harvard University and won a Pulitzer Prize in history for her book, “A Midwife’s Tale,” in 1991.
History is a documented account of the past, Ulrich said, and relies on primary sources from the era of the events, rather than oral transmission.
“History doesn’t always really like memory,” Ulrich said. “History asks memory: where did you get that? And how do you know?”
Ulrich quoted historian Richard White, who said history is the enemy of memory and that history forges a weapon for what memory has forgotten or supressed.
Ulrich said, “And yet, I think as we all know, memory is powerful. It won’t go away. And White admits there are regions of the past that only memory knows.”
Ulrich spoke about the many different versions of her great-grandmother’s death she discovered, from eyewitness documentation to a newspaper account.
Ulrich heard her grandfather tell how his mother, Rachel Davis Thatcher, died suddenly as she did laundry in a lean-to shelter when the roof suddenly collapsed under the weight of snow.
From memory, her grandfather related to her that he nearly died, himself, having left the room only moments before. He remembered the difficulty the family had bringing the body from their home in Idaho to Logan for burial.
Ulrich found Thatcher’s obituary in the special collections section of USU’s library, and found differences in the account. The Logan Leader reported “things that I had never thought of as having any place in a pioneer story,” Ulrich said. The newspaper told how a messenger hurried to a telegram office to send the news to Thatcher’s relatives, including Moses Thatcher, apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and William B. Preston, an LDS presiding bishop, who were both relatives of Rachel Thatcher.
While The Leader gave a lot of names and dates, Ulrich said she remembered the story her grandfather told as one about loss, sorrow, cold and snow.
“[The article] lacked the intimacy of memory and it lacked that curious detail about the laundry, which is so strange that I know I didn’t make it up,” Ulrich said.
Next, Ulrich found a letter Moses wrote to Rachel’s son, who was serving a mission in Ohio at the time of the tragedy. The letter, in essence, gave a scriptural lesson on the suffering of Jesus and the trials of Abraham and Job before breaking the sad news, Ulrich said. She said Moses seemed to be telling Rachel’s son that her death was not an accident, but part of God’s plan.
“In Moses’ letter, Rachel’s death is no longer the fatal accident of the newspaper account,” Ulrich said. “It was part of a grand plan connecting Rachel to the holy scripture, and for her grandson, it was an opportunity to seek God’s comfort.”
-heidithue@cc.usu.edu