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The relationship between memory and history is a productive zone in which the self-understanding of past peoples was formed. This chapter studies four contexts in which memories were constructed in ancient Greece: objects and representations, places, ritual behaviour and associated myths, and textual narratives. Underlying all four is a longstanding Greek desire to link the present to the remote past. Objects, monuments, and temple decorations, for example, were of high significance for this task. Place, location, and close physical proximity to signifiers of the past established the necessary links. Thirdly, local versions of myths became a standard way of raising the profile of places small and large. Finally, textual narratives offer themselves as the framework for and articulation of memories of the past, and here genealogies in the widest sense, from Hesiod's Theogony to the Parian Chronicle, are shown to provide telling material.

In order to explore the theme of connecting histories in personal narratives from the francophone Caribbean, it is important first to examine some of the scholarly debates surrounding history, memory and trauma in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Many studies–including those by Caribbean writers themselves–have emphasized themes of lack, rupture and discontinuity in relation to Caribbean history. For Martinique and Guadeloupe, this loss is primarily explained as a result of slavery and its persistent psychological influences, combined with an ongoing and problematic relationship with France. In the case of Haiti, the loss relates more closely to the political and natural disasters that have plagued the country since independence and have left it in a state of crippling poverty. While it is impossible to deny the impact of these traumas, the present book aims to view the traumatic legacy through a paradigm characterized instead by connection and connectivity.

This chapter aims to explore the connection between history and memory, and analyses the deterritorialisation of the Holocaust. It suggests that there are two kinds of memory – singular and reterritorialising – and explains that the reterritorialising function of memory is developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their A Thousand Plateaus. The analysis of different forms of Holocaust remembrance in the context of Austrian national historiography and Israeli national identity reveals how the Holocaust functions as a reactionary ground of identification.

This introductory essay provides a theoretical and historical overview of how the notions of memory and history have been conceptualized in relation to China. In Pierre Nora’s view state-led memory sacralizes the past, whereas history, as produced by civil society, tends to rationalize it; in authoritarian settings, an additional distinction is often drawn between “official history” and “popular memory,” construed as more “authentic.” This essay further historicizes the notion of popular memories of the Mao era by arguing that they have followed a three-tiered evolution: the first stage in the 1980s gave rise to the expression of mainly traumatic but closely controlled narratives, the second stage in the 1990s was dominated by nostalgia and social protest against marketization of the economy, while the third stage investigated in the present volume evinces a turn toward public debate and critical memory.

What is historical time and how was its traditional – evolutionist - perception maintained during the colonial period but also contested in the years that led to the decolonization of Africa? These two questions inform this chapter. The first one is meta-critical and aims to explore, via thinkers operating at the intersection of history, memory studies, and philosophy (e.g. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Peter Fritzsche, François Hartog, VY Mudimbe, and Stefan Tanaka), the epistemological factors presiding over the development of history but also anthropology and museology during the colonial period; the second question relies more substantially on texts disseminated during the 1945-1960 era by French and African intellectuals like Balandier (‘La Situation coloniale’), Lévi-Strauss (Race et histoire), Ki-Zerbo (‘Histoire et conscience nègre’), and Sartre (‘Orphée noir’). The notion of progress, in its Christian/missionary and secular meanings, is examined through the prism of the two temporal notions – ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ – theorized by Koselleck in Futures Past. It will be shown that post-war Africanist scholarship, albeit still reliant on developmentalist grids, was able to emancipate itself from the racist tropes that had hitherto been used to define Africa and African cultures.

This last section considers Pasadena’s groundbreaking resistance to Brown v. Board of Education, circling back to the book’s overall argument that California was an innovator of methods to restrict and contain black bodies. The history and memory of segregation in California has been submerged or forgotten and the epilogue considers the implications of such practices.

In recent decades, memory has become a major concept and dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, psychology, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and debates about trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary considerations, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. The Introduction to the volume takes memory not only as personal but also as a collective ability to retain, transmit, and reflect on important events of the past. Memory thus becomes the vehicle for collective self-understanding often prompted by a collectively shared trauma, which then serves as the basis for producing a new history. The discussion moves on to outline the topics central to the book, such as collective and cultural memory, memory and autobiography, the role of the mnemonics, the relationship between memory and history, and the role of forgetting in the constitution of memory.

This chapter analyses a number of exhibitions that include ghostly apparitions of historical figures, in a modern and high-tech version of the 18th and 19th century Phantasmagoria. This kind of solution is particularly common in history and memory museums, where audio-visual projections of historical characters or testimonies appear, like spectres, to tell their story to visitors. The chapter analyses some relevant case studies, which include Peter Greenaway’s Peopling the Palaces, an artistic audio-visual installation in the historical site of Venaria Reale, in Italy. These kind of audio-visual exhibition strategies create evocative and impressive experiences, intensifying the emotional impact of the exhibitions and the visitors’ involvement.

The introduction begins by describing Francis's popularity, the many different images of him, and the ways interpretations have changed over time. It then lays out the two main arguments of the book--that interpretations of Francis are historically and culturally conditioned, and that they often, paradoxically, represent alternatives to the conditions that form them. Noting that the book is not primarily about spirituality, the introduction encourages spiritually-minded readers to broaden and deepen their knowledge. It introduces the broad themes of sainthood, place, and the uses of history. After a brief description of terminology and sources, it summarizes the life and legend of Francis and outlines the chapters to come.

Witnessing can assume many different forms including religious, literary, and legal versions. This chapter begins by focusing on examples of textual witnessing such as the sourcebooks of Tcherikower and Dubnow mentioned in Chapter 2 in which the compilers assembled troves of documents as a form of historical proof. The focus then shifts from the first to the second half of the twentieth century by discussing instances in which historians are called upon to take the stand in legal cases. The chapter explores a range of cases related to the Holocaust in which historians played important roles as witnesses, particularly the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 in which historian Salo W. Baron was a key witness. The chapter concludes by discussing the libel trial brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt in London in 2000 in which a “dream team” of historians, including Richard Evans and Christopher Browning, served as defense witnesses. The victory of Lipstadt’s side proved to be a vindication for memory, as well as history, and, as such, an indication of the somewhat porous boundary between them.

This chapter analyzes differences between memory and history stemming from a theoretical distinction between romantic and idealized goals and enlightened and critical understanding goals of history education. National narratives and national identity are two key elements in the construction of both collective memories and history education. This chapter analyzes and provides examples of theoretical and empirical work involving six different dimensions of school history narratives: a homogeneous historical subject, identification processes, heroic and idealized key historical figures, a monocausal and teleological account of historical events, moral value judgments, and an essentialist conceptualization of nation and national identity. Finally, a concise analysis of school historical re-enactments as a cultural scenario, which greatly contributes to the interiorization of the previously mentioned narratives, is presented.

The systematic philosophical study of the concepts of memory and recollection begins in antiquity with Plato and Aristotle, followed by Greek and Roman Stoics and the later tradition of the Platonists. Plato develops an original understanding of recollection as the process of learning that can lead to the knowledge of the unchangeable forms of things. On such an interpretation, recollection is a process similar to the discursive motion of thought through a series of steps in a philosophical argument, mathematical proof, or logical syllogism. Memory, then, complements recollection as a retention of traces of sense perception or thought. The chapter also discusses the role of memory and recollection in the art of memory, which was widely used in rhetoric, as well as the relation between history and memory, and draws on the epic catalogue tradition.

In 1941 Sinn Féin President Margaret Buckley took legal action against the State in an attempt to recover the Sinn Féin funds that had been lodged in the Free State Courts two decades earlier. This episode gave an interesting insight into what Sinn Féin had contributed to Irish history, how the past was recorded by those who had played a major part in the Revolutionary period, and who could claim the legacy of the pre-Civil War party.

Offering an in-depth introduction to the entire volume, this chapter presents a global overview of the history of the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, alongside a critical review of its historiography. It then surveys the remembrance/forgetting of the Great Flu (and its eclipse by remembrance of the Great War) over an entire century, charting revivals of interest. A theoretical approach to understanding the dissonance between public silence and the persistence of private recollections is explained through a sophisticated concept of ‘social forgetting’. A corresponding concept of ‘cultural forgetting’ sheds light on how literary, artistic and cinematic representations eluded the canon and were largely unnoticed.

This chapter examines an example of how minjian memories and minjian historiography transform our knowledge of the history of the Cultural Revolution. In the case of the end of the Rustication movement, many unofficial sources contradict the official version, represented by the press of the time or by the recent TV series Deng Xiaoping. In February 1979, while the People’s Daily published a speech criticizing the Yunnan educated youth who had come to Beijing to demand the right to return to their native cities, on the ground in Yunnan, the educated youths were in fact packing up and going back home by the thousands, after a victorious petitioning movement. This movement of historical importance was never officially acknowledged. In the TV series, the sudden end of the rustication movement is attributed to the wisdom of Deng Xiaoping and the petitioning movement (including strikes, hunger strikes and the sending of delegations) is replaced by the individual petition of a female educated youth wanting to go back home to take care of her gravely ill father who succeeds in touching the heart of a good cadre. The contribution of unofficial sources is thus particularly obvious in this case.

The afterlife of Oliver Cromwell and his deeds have been extensively studied, but this introductory chapter will argue that a key part of that afterlife—namely, the memory of him—can only be grasped in its entirety by stretching the boundaries of traditional historical study. This means that alternative sources must be utilized, including folklore and material culture, just as conventional adherence to an allegedly neutral, factual empiricism must give way to more fanciful and legendary narratives that accrued around social memories of Cromwell and by extension the Cromwellians who came to be associated with him. This chapter will also discuss the reasons for Cromwell’s distinction as Ireland’s national villain, and investigate how his iconic persona was forged in England during the 1640s, when it then migrated to Ireland. Finally, theories of social remembrance, forgetting, and reputation will also be explored, in addition to the approaches that will be engaged throughout the book.

This chapter attempts to extract the sense of trauma by engaging the same synthesis in its legitimate form in the case of the Amish shootings in Pennsylvania. It suggests that the shootings of ten Amish schoolgirls and the community's response to this event provide us with an important shift in focus away from either being an unrepresentable trauma figured as lack (void of content), or an uncompromising repetition of memory that refuses to forget a traumatic experience. The chapter argues that the Amish response to the incident extracted the sense of trauma that emerges between appearances and copies, memory and history, all the while encouraging us to pose our question of traumatic memory in slightly different terms.