IWISH TO address in this chapter the disadvantages for historians of the cult of anniversaries in Europe today. In 1989 I wrote Celebrations: The Cult of Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today, which was reprinted in June 2011. A French translation appeared in 1992. Let me begin by summarizing some of my earlier views about cultural celebrations. They help to explain why I have been invited here to present my critique of how the cult of anniversaries distorts historians’ prioritizing. There is no need to remind you that historical commemorations like that of Charles V in the millennial year 2000, of Frédéric Chopin in 2010, and of both Franz Liszt and Gustav Mahler in 2011 flourished more than ever. What has been called the “cult of anniversaries” con-sists of an expectation that the years of birth and/or death of cultural luminaries must be celebrated through events and publications financed out of the cultural budgets of nations, regions, cities, and private foundations. The same applies to fiftieth and hundredth anniversaries of political and military events, as in 2011 with the American Civil War that began in 1861. The readiness of European institutions to invest large sums in commemorations of cultural, as distinct from political, anniversaries astonishes North Americans like me. We Americans treat such occasions with mild interest or even indifference, and our commemorations of cultural heroes—even major ones like Abraham Lincoln, who was born just over two hundred years ago in 1809—are far more modest than those in Europe. Contrasts in the intensity of exploitation of historical anniversaries have become a major point of difference between Europe and North America.

In Celebrations: The Cult of Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today, I explored reasons for differences between European and American habits of commemoration. I connected Europe's acceleration in numbers and panache of anniversary festivals to the phenomenon of secularization. The decline in religious modes of remembering has, I then argued, left a vacuum which is increasingly filled by festivals whose timing is dictated solely by the calendar. At first glance, the willingness of cultural programmers to rely so heavily on the calendar of anniversaries seems timid and arbitrary. But a closer look shows that the Great Calendar of birth and death dates provides pre-dictability, stability, and consensus.