Download or read book Collective Memory and the Historical Past written by Jeffrey Andrew Barash and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality.
Download or read book Time Maps written by Eviatar Zerubavel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pioneering sociologist and author of The Seven Day Circle continues his analysis of time with this fascinating look at history as social construct. Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Is a seventh cousin still a cousin? Why do some societies name their children after dead ancestors? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in Time Maps, we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past and the social grammar of conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, and from ancient Egypt to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we tie discontinuous events together into stories; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Time Maps extends beyond all of the old clichés about linear, circular, and spiral patterns of historical process and provides us with models of the actual legends used to map history…brilliant and elegant."-Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz
Download or read book History and Collective Memory from the Margins written by Sahana Mukherjee and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2019 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary research from diverse fields such as psychology, history, education, and cultural studies to examine the interconnections between collective memory, history, and identity. With research and theoretical examples from around the world, this volume presents both majority and minority, powerful and marginalized perspectives on national representations of history and their various identity-relevant antecedents, meanings, and consequences. Several contributions in this volume highlight the tension between engaging conflicted and negative histories with understanding the nation and the self in the present while other contributions extend this conversation to consider the impact of conflicted histories on future generations. The volume is organized into four parts. Part I highlights emerging theoretical discussions of remembering the past from social identity, intergroup emotion, and sociocultural perspectives. Parts II and III both highlight the bi-directional relationship between how people from various dominant and marginalized groups represent the nation and the consequences for contemporary intergroup relations. These sections highlight how national narratives shape our ideas of who we are, collectively, and how motivations and contemporary identity concerns shape how people engage with the past. To conclude, the book wraps up by discussing intergenerational patterns of collective memory in Part IV. Together, the contributions offer insight into how and why historical events can influence our identity, emotions, relationships, and our motivations to engage with the past"--
Download or read book On Collective Memory written by Maurice Halbwachs and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-09 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? This volume, the first comprehensive English language translation of Maurice Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge.
Download or read book History and Collective Memory in South Asia 1200 2000 written by Sumit Guha and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-11-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.
Download or read book Collective Remembering written by Ludmila Isurin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isurin presents a case study of Russian collective memory as it is constructed by producers and consumed by people.
Download or read book The Politics of Regret written by Jeffrey K. Olick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation – the building blocks of memory, so to speak – across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century. Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts – Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa – are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things – social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war – but it always depends on both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.
Download or read book Generations and Collective Memory written by Amy Corning and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When discussing large social trends or experiences, we tend to group people into generations. But what does it mean to be part of a generation, and what gives that group meaning and coherence? It's collective memory, say Amy Corning and Howard Schuman, and in Generations and Collective Memory, they draw on an impressive range of research to show how generations share memories of formative experiences, and how understanding the way those memories form and change can help us understand society and history. Their key finding—built on historical research and interviews in the United States and seven other countries (including China, Japan, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Israel, and Ukraine)—is that our most powerful generational memories are of shared experiences in adolescence and early adulthood, like the 1963 Kennedy assassination for those born in the 1950s or the fall of the Berlin Wall for young people in 1989. But there are exceptions to that rule, and they're significant: Corning and Schuman find that epochal events in a country, like revolutions, override the expected effects of age, affecting citizens of all ages with a similar power and lasting intensity. The picture Corning and Schuman paint of collective memory and its formation is fascinating on its face, but it also offers intriguing new ways to think about the rise and fall of historical reputations and attitudes toward political issues.
Download or read book The City of Collective Memory written by M. Christine Boyer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the visual and mental models by which urban environment has been recognized, depicted and planned. This analysis draws from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature and painting to identify these maps of the city - as a work of art, as panorama and as spectacle.
Download or read book Past in the Making written by Michal Kopecek and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical revisionism, far from being restricted to small groups of ‘negationists,’ has galvanized debates in the realm of recent history. The studies in this book range from general accounts of the background of recent historical revisionism to focused analyses of particular debates or social-cultural phenomena in individual Central European countries, from Germany to Ukraine and Estonia. Where is the borderline between legitimate re-examination of historical interpretations and attempts to rewrite history in a politically motivated way that downgrades or denies essential historical facts? How do the traditional ‘national historical narratives’ react to the ‘spill-over’ of international and political controversies into their ‘sphere of influence’? Technological progress, along with the overall social and cultural decentralization shatters the old hierarchies of academic historical knowledge under the banner of culture of memory, and breeds an unequalled democratization in historical representation. This book offers a unique approach based on the provocative and instigating intersection of scholarly research, its political appropriations, and social reflection from a representative sample of Central and East European countries.
Download or read book In Praise of Forgetting written by David Rieff and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, "inoculate" the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds--whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces--neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option--sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times--the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11--Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.
Download or read book Television Histories written by Gary R. Edgerton and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Ken Burns's documentaries to historical dramas such as Roots, from A&E's Biography series to CNN, television has become the primary source for historical information for tens of millions of Americans today. Why has television become such a respected authority? What falsehoods enter our collective memory as truths? How is one to know what is real and what is imagined—or ignored—by producers, directors, or writers? Gary Edgerton and Peter Rollins have collected a group of essays that answer these and many other questions. The contributors examine the full spectrum of historical genres, but also institutions such as the History Channel and production histories of such series as The Jack Benny Show, which ran for fifteen years. The authors explore the tensions between popular history and professional history, and the tendency of some academics to declare the past "off limits" to nonscholars. Several of them point to the tendency for television histories to embed current concerns and priorities within the past, as in such popular shows as Quantum Leap and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The result is an insightful portrayal of the power television possesses to influence our culture.
Download or read book Performing the Past written by Karin Tilmans and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karin Tilmans is an historian, and academic coordinator of the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute, Florence. Frank van Vree is an historian and professor of journalism at the University of Amsterdam. Jay M. Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale. --
Download or read book Frames of Remembrance written by Iwona Irwin-Zarecka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the symbolic impact of the Vietnam War Memorial? How does television change our engagement with the past? Can the efforts to wipe out Communist legacies succeed? Should victims of the Holocaust be celebrated as heroes or as martyrs? These questions have a great deal in common, yet they are typically asked separately by people working in distinct research areas in different disciplines. Frames of Remembrance shares ideas and concerns across such divides.
Download or read book Collective Memory written by Rauf R. Garagozov and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many studies have tracked the fickle fates of history and memory across changing political fields, but few have achieved the kind of close attention historiography and its social settings that we find in this erudite work from Rauf Garagozov. Equally at home in psychology, history, politics, and cultural studies, Garagozov argues convincingly for the role of "templates" in shifting collective memories. Scholars of Russia and the Caucasus will find particular value in this work, though its message is for all of us living in modern states whose leaders are anxious to narrate, and regulate, popular pasts.
Download or read book Global Intellectual History written by Samuel Moyn and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where do ideas fit into historical accounts that take an expansive, global view of human movements and events? Teaching scholars of intellectual history to incorporate transnational perspectives into their work, while also recommending how to confront the challenges and controversies that may arise, this original resource explains the concepts, concerns, practice, and promise of "global intellectual history," featuring essays by leading scholars on various approaches that are taking shape across the discipline. The contributors to Global Intellectual History explore the different ways in which one can think about the production, dissemination, and circulation of "global" ideas and ask whether global intellectual history can indeed produce legitimate narratives. They discuss how intellectuals and ideas fit within current conceptions of global frames and processes of globalization and proto-globalization, and they distinguish between ideas of the global and those of the transnational, identifying what each contributes to intellectual history. A crucial guide, this collection sets conceptual coordinates for readers eager to map an emerging area of study.
Download or read book Forging the Collective Memory written by Keith Wilson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When studying the origins of the First World War, scholars have relied heavily on the series of key diplomatic documents published by the governments of both the defeated and the victorious powers in the 1920s and 1930s. However, this volume shows that these volumes, rather than dealing objectively with the past, were used by the different governments to project an interpretation of the origins of the Great War that was more palatable to them and their country than the truth might have been. In revealing policies that influenced the publication of the documents, the relationships between the commissioning governments, their officials, and the historians involved, this collection serves as a warning that even seemingly objective sources have to be used with caution in historical research.
