History is indeed a series of stories. If none of them is true in some sort of Newtonian way (in the same way that gravity is "true" or that centrifugal force is "true") then they are true in a sort of Einsteinian way. These stories are relative, so that they shift with the position of the speaker, but this does not mean that they are not true. History is located in all of those different positions, all of the different perspectives of an event. It is the collection of all of the memories of those who were present - as witnesses or as participants - to a set of events. But history is more than memory, as Alfred Young demonstrates in his The Shoemaker and the Tea Party : Memory and the American Revolution (2000), for it is also a tool of instruction a way in which we not only hold on to the past but consciously use that past to shape the present and the future. It is as much a series of instructions for the future as it is a map of the past.
Young's book demonstrates the ways in which memory is translated into history by using the memories of one man and examining the ways in which those memories were honed to serve the needs of an emerging nation, and the ways in which they are still used to meet the needs of each new generation of Americans as they try to understand what it means to be an American, what it means to live in a country with one particular past and not some other past.
The book focuses on the events of December 16, 1773, when a group of about 150 white men disguised themselves as Mohawks and boarded three ships docked at Boston's Griffin's Wharf, broke open crates containing tea (bearing heavy import taxes) and through the leaves into Boston Harbor. Anyone with even the most passing knowledge of American history knows about this event, knows about the Boston Tea Party. But Young goes beyond the elementary-school version to ask what the event would have meant to those who participated in it - as well as in other even...