unhistory

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ history.

Noun

unhistory (countable and uncountable, plural unhistories)

1. The stories of ordinary people who are not considered historical.
   • 1986, Norman Page, Thomas Hardy Annual - Issue 4, page 72:

     The mill-house, like the family of the miller, is for Hardy a representative part of the unhistory of the country, what we now know as local history, and which many consider to be the only sure basis of any historical knowledge;

   • 1996, Colby Quarterly - Volumes 32-33, page 136:

     Hagen and Zelman note that "what we lost" is also the "unwritten sufferings of ordinary women, ordinary people" who "are doomed to become unhistory" (445).

   • 2006, Cheryl Savageau, Mother/Land:

     Savageau’s “unhistory” tells the stories of her people without privileging the moment of contact with Europe as the defining moment for viewing the culture.

2. The suppressed history of controversial events.
   • 1971, Mortimer Lipsky, Never Again War: The Case for World Government, page 168:

     Somehow, in this eerie age of unhistory, the whole meaning and purpose of life has been twisted around, warped and distorted.

   • 1990, Newsweek - Volume 115, page 28:

     Kutler says, "Nixon would have us make unhistory out of a sequence of events for which we have ample evidence.

   • 1993, David Ernest Apter, Democracy, Violence and Emancipatory Movements:

     Moreover, once retrieved, suppressed events, confrontational episodes, submerged political upheavals, abortive uprising offer symbolic density or enrichment to current circumstances. They enlarge the retina of the political eye. How to transform the unhistory of the negativized, to make the anonymes impinge on history, is one way to put the matter.

   • 2012, Mickey Huff, Andy Lee Roth, Censored 2013:

     This chapter intends to expose the lies of the state in order to uncensor the “unhistory” of the Kent State massacre, while also aiming toward justice and healing, as censoring the past impacts our perspectives in the present.

   • 2014, Eve Tuck, Marcia McKenzie, Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods, page 154:

     Thus, settler colonialism involves a daedal arrangement of justifications and unhistories in order to deny genocide and brutality.

3. Inaccurate representations of the past that are presented as history.
   • 1895, Abraham Van Doren Honeyman, Coaching in Merrie England:

     The history, or rather the unhistory, of Stonehenge, is, paradoxical though it seems, a long and old story.

   • 1995, Mark Currie, Metafiction, page 77:

     However, they encounter a serious problem: the actor begins to alter the dates of verifiable historical events, moving the Tunguska explosion from 1888 to 1908. We are told that, from this point on, 'the film project foundered further into a chaos of unhistory' (1983, 56).

   • 1996, Sven Spieker, Figures of memory and forgetting in Andrej Bitov's prose, page 73:

     In trying to reenact the historical event, however, the main actor alters the script and produces "unhistory" (1989: 56). In Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes documents a journey to Japan which has never occurred.

   • 2013, Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer, The Time Traveller's Almanac:

     Not only is the information you came here to seek buried in a near-infinite stack of unhistories, it's unlikely you'll ever be able to return to it – unless you can find the point where that sector's history was altered and undo the alteration.