This is a fine example of measure historical-ethical or ethico-historical reflection. Thank you for it, @mfordhamhistory: it is characteristically clear and insightful. 1 https://twitter.com/mfordhamhistory/status/1274342624535760896

Permit me some observations (not intended as criticisms). 1.
Ethics enters into the archives - where we encounter the traces of the lives of others whose consent we cannot gain and yet with which we make text. We have an ethical duty to those with whose traces we work, IMO.

I don’t claim to have this worked out.
Colleagues in Holocaust education have thought harder on this than I have - notably @p_salmons, @AlexMaws @UCL_Holocaust colleagues. These issues are particularly complex when the archival traces are themselves traces of historic injustice

Such as perpetrator photographs of victims. Working with these sources entails ethical obligations to the dead - what Paddy Walsh calls ‘piety’. Another additional sense of ethics - linked to this - arises when we write, speak or teach about the past -

We should always ask ‘How are we representing people?’ A modest victim of a massacre did not ‘ask’ to be on our worksheets or power point and would probably be horrified to know they were - one can(unthinkingly) add insult to past injury.

There is also the ethics of audience - of what we ‘do’ to our pupils through what we ‘show’ in class. In the past I advocated ‘hooks’ at the start of lessons which I am deeply ashamed of know (one was of a lynching that started with the faces of the crowd). This ignored...

The rights of the vicitms, perpetuated dehumanisation and did not think at all about the emotions and reactions of my class. We have pioneering work to thank for moving us on from such crass practice (of which, to repeat, I am ashamed).

Kay Traille’s superb doctoral work with families of Afro-Caribbean heritage on their perceptions of the teaching of slavery is a paradigm case. We published some of Kay’s findings on Teaching History (127, I think).

There’s an awful lot more to say, I know, about the ethics of researching and representing history in public and in class, I know - for example, about history and symbolic violence. Thank you for stimulating thought.