Forging The Collective Memory

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.

Abraham Lincoln has long dominated the pantheon of American presidents. From his lavish memorial in Washington and immortalization on Mount Rushmore, one might assume he was a national hero rather than a controversial president who came close to losing his 1864 bid for reelection. In Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Barry Schwartz aims at these contradictions in his study of Lincoln's reputation, from the president's death through the industrial revolution to his apotheosis during the Progressive Era and First World War. Schwartz draws on a wide array of materials—painting and sculpture, popular magazines and school textbooks, newspapers and oratory—to examine the role that Lincoln's memory has played in American life. He explains, for example, how dramatic funeral rites elevated Lincoln's reputation even while funeral eulogists questioned his presidential actions, and how his reputation diminished and grew over the next four decades. Schwartz links transformations of Lincoln's image to changes in the society. Commemorating Lincoln helped Americans to think about their country's development from a rural republic to an industrial democracy and to articulate the way economic and political reform, military power, ethnic and race relations, and nationalism enhanced their conception of themselves as one people. Lincoln's memory assumed a double aspect of "mirror" and "lamp," acting at once as a reflection of the nation's concerns and an illumination of its ideals, and Schwartz offers a fascinating view of these two functions as they were realized in the commemorative symbols of an ever-widening circle of ethnic, religious, political, and regional communities. The first part of a study that will continue through the present, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory is the story of how America has shaped its past selectively and imaginatively around images rooted in a real person whose character and achievements helped shape his country's future.

Remembering Social Movements offers a comparative historical examination of the relations between social movements and collective memory. A detailed historiographical and theoretical review of the field introduces the reader to five key concepts to help guide analysis: repertoires of contention, historical events, generations, collective identities, and emotions. The book examines how social movements act to shape public memory as well as how memory plays an important role within social movements through 15 historical case studies, spanning labour, feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, and urban movements, as well as specific examples of ‘memory activism’ from the 19th century to the 21st century. These include transnational and explicitly comparative case studies, in addition to cases rooted in German, Australian, Indian, and American history, ensuring that the reader gains a real insight into the remembrance of social activism across the globe and in different contexts. The book concludes with an epilogue from a prominent Memory Studies scholar. Bringing together the previously disparate fields of Memory Studies and Social Movement Studies, this book systematically scrutinises the two-way relationship between memory and activism and uses case studies to ground students while offering analytical tools for the reader.

With its rich foundation stories, Philadelphia may be the most important city in America's collective memory. By the middle of the eighteenth century William Penn's "greene countrie town" was, after London, the largest city in the British Empire. The two most important documents in the history of the United States, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were drafted and signed in Philadelphia. The city served off and on as the official capital of the young country until 1800, and was also the site of the first American university, hospital, medical college, bank, paper mill, zoo, sugar refinery, public school, and government mint. In First City, acclaimed historian Gary B. Nash examines the complex process of memory making in this most historic of American cities. Though history is necessarily written from the evidence we have of the past, as Nash shows, rarely is that evidence preserved without intent, nor is it equally representative. Full of surprising anecdotes, First City reveals how Philadelphians—from members of elite cultural institutions, such as historical societies and museums, to relatively anonymous groups, such as women, racial and religious minorities, and laboring people—have participated in the very partisan activity of transmitting historical memory from one generation to the next.

Cosmopolitanism and the Development of the International Criminal Court analyzes a set of prominent and competing discourses that emerged in the context of the development and establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC is the first permanent juridical body designed to prosecute individuals who commit offences including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Drawing on scholarship on public memory and human rights, the book argues that international law and the international human rights system play a key role for the development of transnational memory discourses and transnational or cosmopolitan subjectivities. Despite the International Criminal Court being recognized as a landmark development in global cooperation, an examination of key events in the development of the court shows how some state and nonstate actors advance calls for cosmopolitanism while others resist cosmopolitanism to bolster nation-state sovereignty. Drawing on the establishment of the International Criminal Court as a case study, the book examines several events that continue to shape national and international public discourse. The book examines debates that occurred during the drafting process of the international treaty at the United Nations and that led to the groundbreaking inclusion of provisions on gender and sexual violence in the Rome Statute of the ICC in 1998. The analysis discusses the tension between feminist advocates’ rhetoric and the discourse of anti–women’s rights actors involved in the treaty-making process who resisted such inclusions in international criminal law. The book analyzes other key events related to the establishment of the ICC that invoke tensions between competing demands of cosmopolitanism and national sovereignty, including advocacy campaigns by nongovernmental organizations working to drum up public support of the institution of the International Criminal Court and the debates surrounding the unprecedented act of the United States “unsigning” an international treaty. In sum, this examination of the rhetoric of state and nonstate actors attempting to shape the court according to their visions of global community shows how discourses about international criminal law and human rights are employed not only to advance cosmopolitanism but also to strengthen nationalist discourses.

This book uses a micro-narrative structure to explore the assault on the collective memory of Mexican Americans in the Southwest United States from 2010–2016. These communities’ survival depends on their histories and identities, which are being quickly erased by gentrification and dispersal, neoliberalism and privatization. This issue is most apparent in the education system, where Mexican American students receive inferior educations and lack access to higher education. Avoiding the overly-theoretical macro-narrative, this book uses case studies and micro-narratives to suggest possible changes and actions to address this issue. It also explores how the erasure of Mexican Americans’ history and identity mirrors society as a whole.

A comparative study of how museum exhibitions in Britain, Canada and Australia were used to depict the First World War.

This collection aims to enable the reader to disentangle some of the ambiguities and confusions which have characterized the use of the term 'historiography'.