News In Public Memory

News in Public Memory brings together a team of international experts to investigate the media-transmitted history of the twentieth century as it exists in the memories and minds of people living in diverse cultures across the globe. This book compares media-related childhood memories across three generations in nine countries. Results reveal that events of the past century are not only historical «facts» but have become substantial elements of a new global collective memory that has been integrated into generational identity worldwide. The global approach of this research encourages the idea that the world is an interconnected whole, but it also helps to advance a better understanding of the different perceptions of global and local news as they emerge from various cultural angles and geographical regions.

What stories do we tell about America’s once-great industries at a time when they are fading from the landscape? Pennsylvania in Public Memory attempts to answer that question, exploring the emergence of a heritage culture of industry and its loss through the lens of its most representative industrial state. Based on news coverage, interviews, and more than two hundred heritage sites, this book traces the narrative themes that shape modern public memory of coal, steel, railroading, lumber, oil, and agriculture, and that collectively tell a story about national as well as local identity in a changing social and economic world.

Exposing how memory is constructed and mediated in different societies, this collection explores particular contexts to identify links between the politics of memory, media representations and the politics of justice, questioning what we think we know and understand about recent history.

This essay collection explores the inextricable link between rhetoric, public memory, and campus history projects. Since the early twentieth century after Brown University appointed its Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, higher education institutions around the globe have launched initiatives to research, document, and share their connections to slavery and its legacies. Many of these explorations have led to investigations about the rhetorical nature of campus history projects, including the names of buildings, the installation of monuments, the publication of books, the production of resolutions, and the hosting of public programs. The essays in this collection examine the rhetorical nature of a range of initiatives, including the creation of land acknowledgement statements, the memorialization of universities’ historic financial ties to the slave trade, the installation and removal of monuments or historical markers, the development of curriculum for campus history projects. The book takes a chronological approach, beginning with the examination of a project at a university that was built on the site of a historic Native American town, moving through a series of essays about initiatives that grew out of universities’ associations with slavery and its legacies in the United Kingdom and America, and ending with a critique of several pedagological approaches in campus history courses designed for undergraduate students.

This collection explores the ways in which traumatic experience becomes a part of public memory. It explores the premise that traumatic events are realities; they happen in the world, not in the fantasy life of individuals or in the narrative frames of our televisions and cinemas.

Using rhetorical criticism as a research method, Public Memory and the Television Series Outlander examines how public memory is created in the first four seasons of the popular television show Outlander. In this book, Valerie Lynn Schrader discusses the connections between documented history and the series, noting where Outlander's depiction of events aligns with documented history and where it does not, as well as how public memory is created through the use of music, language, directorial and performance choices, and mise-en-scéne elements like filming location, props, and costumes. Schrader also explores the impact that Outlander has had on Scottish tourism (known as the “Outlander effect”) and reflects on whether other filming locations or depicted locations may experience a similar effect as Outlander’s settings move from Scotland to other areas of the world. Furthermore, Schrader suggests that the creation of public memory through the television series encourages audiences to learn about history and reflect on current issues that are brought to light through that public memory.

How is the Holocaust remembered in Romania since the fall of communism? Alexandru Florian and an international group of contributors unveil how and why Romania, a place where large segments of the Jewish and Roma populations perished, still fails to address its recent past. These essays focus on the roles of government and public actors that choose to promote, construct, defend, or contest the memory of the Holocaust, as well as the tools—the press, the media, monuments, and commemorations—that create public memory. Coming from a variety of perspectives, these essays provide a compelling view of what memories exist, how they are sustained, how they can be distorted, and how public remembrance of the Holocaust can be encouraged in Romanian society today.

This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of Media Memory and brings Media and Mediation to the forefront of Collective Memory research. The essays explore a diversity of media technologies (television, radio, film and new media), genres (news, fiction, documentaries) and contexts (US, UK, Spain, Nigeria, Germany and the Middle East).