In Gaddis’ final chapter, “Seeing Like a Historian” he proposes that the historian plays the role of “oppressor” when writing history and that the historians biggest fear is the resurrection of their historical subjects from the dead and their critique of the Historians interpretation of their reality; is to me, an interesting concept and an important one. In class we have spoken about the role of presentism in historical analysis and how modern ideas and perspectives can be carried over by an author into their interpretation of the past and distort it. Gaddis maintains that this process is not always purposeful but rather inevitable and a part of human nature. He goes on to say that history is only a representation of reality much in the same way a map is only a representation of geography and that over time these representations become reality. Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities explore this concept on a grander scale by showing how the modern emergence of the nation state led to the concept of nationalism and Imagined Communities. According to Anderson, a nation is an imagined community because it is socially constructed by people living and participating in a society who perceive themselves as part of a homogeneous group different from that of other human beings although they have no personal bond and face-to-face communication with other members of their society in order to maintain the function of said society – the perceived boundaries between them and other nations are largely illusory. This process of representations becoming reality and the creation of constructed memories, as Gaddis put it, are the way humans come to terms with and cope with the past. Furthermore, these constructed memories can also serve a positive function. “We liberate the ones that have from their self-proclaimed grandiosity: we try not to confuse how they wanted to be seen with who they actually were. And we try to free those who left no monuments from the resulting silences, whether imposed upon them by others, or by themselves” (140). The duality of historian as oppressor and liberator and the largely unconscious process behind it is an important thought to keep in mind when interpreting the historical work of ourselves and others as well as the reality of everyday life.