Realms of Memory

The number of disappeared from the years of dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) is still unknown.  What is clear is the lingering trauma.  Anthropologist Tony Robben has spent his career studying the repercussions of this era.  Robben argues that the inability to mourn the dead and the military’s continued refusal to take responsibility for the past has splintered Argentina into competing memory...

Beginning with calls for never again, we’re living in an age where the duty to remember has become sacrosanct.  Memory has become a means of righting past wrongs, fostering trust and strengthening social cohesion.  But is it also possible to see memory as a destabilizing force, undercutting the prospects for peace and stability?  This is precisely what David Rieff argues in his book In Praise of F...

When should we remember difficult and divisive histories?  After a career of covering conflicts around the globe, writer and political analyst David Reiff offers his thoughts on the question. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies , Rieff posits that in some cases there is a consensus around the need to remember past crimes.  More often, however, there is no agreement.  The onl...

The people on the borders have been forgotten and left out of the story of the partition of Ireland.  Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, the three lost counties of Ulster, are both a source of shame and embarrassment for the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  They are an unrecognized minority within the largely homogenized Catholic nation of Ireland.  They are also the abandoned kin of the peopl...

Typically left out of the story of the partition of Ireland are the three lost counties of Ulster.  These are the counties of Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan that were excluded from what became Northern Ireland despite their historic ties and shared stand against the creation of an independent Irish state.  If Dublin and Belfast failed to form closer ties, it is impossible to understand why without c...

The memory of the Soviet triumph in World War II, or what is known as the Great Patriotic War, has become the centerpiece of Russian nationalism today. Penn State Professor Katya Haskins argues that the propensity to remember the victory over Nazi Germany and to forget Stalin’s terror contributes to the Russian willingness to support the war in Ukraine. Steeped in the memory of the Great Patriotic...

The memory of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War, has become the centerpiece of Russian nationalism.  State driven politics of memory, however, cannot fully explain this development.  Duty bound to remember the unimaginable sacrifices of the World War II generation, Russian families are a receptive audience to patriotic messaging.  Products of a...

From Spain to the Baltic States Europe is littered with sites connected to the personal lives of former dictators.  Birthplaces, childhood homes, summer and winter residences, mausoleums and tombs these sites of dictators can be powerful poles of attraction for extremists, nostalgists, and dark tourists.  They can also offer opportunities to bolster democratic systems by educating citizens about d...

Continental Europe is littered with the memory sites of past dictators.  From birthplaces to summer residences, these remains from Europe’s darkest chapters present serious challenges to the democratic present.  How do Europeans confront this past?  Find out from historian  Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, author of Sites of the Dictators: Memories of Authoritarian Europe, 1945-2020 , on the April 1st ep...

The National Rifle Association, known simply as the NRA, is often cast as a giant bogeyman for proponents of gun reform.  Fears about the NRA are largely based on a misreading and misunderstanding of the organization as a political lobby whose influence peddling in Washington is the chief impediment to sensible gun reform. Entirely off the radar is the true source of power and influence of the NRA...

The National Rifle Association is often understood as a powerful political lobby able to influence politicians and shape legislation.  University of the Fraser Valley political scientist Noah Schwartz argues that the true power of the NRA is how it uses storytelling and memory.  Through its extensive cultural, educational, and communications resources, the stories and memories circulated by the NR...

The 9/11 2001 attacks on America unleashed a surge of memorial work unmatched since the Civil War.  New York City became a magnet for billions of dollars of spending on the construction of a memorial, museum, and high profile projects such as One World Trade Centre and the Oculus.  What do these projects reveal about the nature, constraints, and abuses of 9/11 memory? To what extent have they help...

The attacks of September 11th 2001 challenged core beliefs about how Americans understand themselves, their relationship to others and their place in the world.  How Americans responded to the attacks through their memorial work and the rebuilding of ground zero in New York City is the focus of Marita Sturken’s book Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums and Architecture in the Post 9/11...

In 1989 and 2004 something unusual happened in the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi.  After decades of silence whites finally joined their black neighbors in commemorating the 1964 murders of three young civil rights workers.  What was different about 2004, however, was that the commemoration was just the beginning. The organizers forged an identity, as the Philadelphia Coalitio...

In 1964 three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in Neshoba County Mississippi for their participation in the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign.  How did the white community silence this past while local African Americans kept it alive? Why did both white and black Neboba Countians ultimately come together to organize two commemorations of these murders with very different...

For decades the Cold War border between East and West Germany was one of the most militarized places on the planet.  Hundreds of East Germans died and thousands more were imprisoned in their attempts to cross it.  How did this former death strip become Germany’s largest conservation zone, known as the Green Belt?  How did memory become a core feature of the Green Belt and how can mnemonic, or memo...

How did the death strip that once separated East and West Germany become the country’s largest protected ecological corridor?  Drawing from her recent book, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain , Bates College Environmental Studies Professor Sonja Pieck explains the origins and evolution of what is known as Germany’s Green Belt.  In particular she detail...

The Great Depression was perhaps the closest the capitalist system in the United States has ever come to complete collapse.  Equally unprecedented was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal response which dramatically transformed the relationship between government, capitalism, and the American people.  How was it possible that there was no national memorial to Franklin Roosevelt in Washington D.C. until 1...

The Great Depression was one of the most seismic events in modern American history.  Equally important was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the crisis which dramatically transformed the role played by the government in the United States and the lives of its citizens.  Why then is there no shared, collective memory of the New Deal and the Great Depression?  Why did it take decades before F...

Author, co-author, and co-editor of over twenty books on the history of Ukraine, Georgiy Kaisanov has devoted much of his attention to the study of memory politics.  In Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010s , he reveals how Ukrainian history is based on a revamped, century-old, ethnonationalist history that excludes and alienates a significant part of the populati...

Memories of the past have been central to the process of nation-state building in Ukraine.  Rather than starting anew after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians dusted off a hundred year old ethnic-nationalist history and applied it wholesale to the present.  In Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010 , historian Georgiy Kasianov argues that the consequences...

Make America Great Again, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan has become synonymous with his entire political movement.  MAGA, the acronym, is now a catch phrase used for Trump’s most ardent supporters.  Emblazoned on millions of red hats, which Trump himself helped promote, the Make America Great Again slogan lived on, even after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential elections.  Wi...

Across the political divide Americans view each other with ever deepening sentiments of distrust and suspicion.  Historian Matthew Rowley argues that the absence of shared memories of a national past fuels this polarization and the rise of violence in American politics.  In Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again , Rowley looks at what the published work of American Protestan...

How can the past be turned against its memory keepers?  How can the successes and accomplishments of a person or movement be undone by intentionally misremembering and distorting the past?   University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues that this is precisely what’s been happening with the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  Since the Reagan era th...

From Latinos and women to the disabled and the LGBTQ community, a wide range of disadvantaged groups have achieved significant legal gains in the United States since the 1960s.  This minority rights revolution inevitably sparked a backlash among white conservatives who felt threatened by change.  In this fierce struggle over the values and character of the nation, University of Southern California...