“Amnesia is frightening and pitiful because the amnesiac does not know who she is; when she recovers her memory she recovers her identity. The same, mutatis mutandis, is true for peoples; their beliefs about their origins and histories contribute crucially to their sense of their existence as a people and of what sort people they are, and a populace wholly amnesic about its past, if such a thing could be imagined, could not know itself as a people.”
-Katharine Toll