Tangible Memories

California may be the golden state but it is also a garden state. Innumerable gardens have been made since the Europeans first came, starting with the Franciscan missionaries.The gold rush was the defining period, leading to immense expenditures by newly rich miners. This book discusses many simple but beautiful gardens created by waves of immigrants. Gardens were necessary for food but also represented repose and leisure. The nature and style of domestic and private gardens shape the landscape of cities and towns just as much as large civic architectural achievements.

Tangible Memories whisks you up in an emotional adventure of love and deceit. Weaving through various lives, chance and fate are intertwined to capture your heart and move your soul. An innocently seductive and intense story that will leave you yearning for true love.

Whether we think of statues, plaques, street-names, practices, material or intangible forms of remembrance, the language of collective memory is everywhere, installed in the name of not only nations, or even empires, but also an international past. The essays in Sites of International Memory address the notion of a shared past, and how this idea is promulgated through sites and commemorative gestures that create or promote cultural memory of such global issues as wars, genocide, and movements of cross-national trade and commerce, as well as resistance and revolution. In doing so, this edited collection asks: Where are the sites of international memory? What are the elements of such memories of international pasts, and of internationalism? How and why have we remembered or forgotten "sites" of international memory? Which elements of these international pasts are useful in the present? Some contributors address specific sites and moments--World War II, liberation movements in India and Ethiopia, commemorations of genocide--while other pieces concentrate more on the theoretical, on the idea of cultural memory. UNESCO's presence looms large in the volume, as it is the most visible and iconic international organization devoted to creating critical heritage studies on a world stage. Formed in the aftermath of World War II, UNESCO was instrumental in promoting the idea of a "humanity" that exists beyond national, regional, or cultural borders or definitions. Since then, UNESCO's diplomatic and institutional channels have become the sites at which competing notions of international, world, and "human" communities have jostled in conjunction with politically specific understandings of cultural value and human rights. This volume has been assembled to investigate sites of international memory that commemorate a past when it was possible to imagine, identify, and invoke "international" ideas, institutions, and experiences, in diverse, historically situated contexts. Contributors:Dominique Biehl, Kristal Buckley, Roland Burke, Kate Darian-Smith, Sarah C. Dunstan, David Goodman, Madeleine Herren, Philippa Hetherington, Rohan Howitt, Alanna O'Malley, Eric Paglia, Glenda Sluga, Sverker Sörlin, Carolien Stolte, Beatrice Wayne, Ralph Weber, Jay Winter.

The Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies offers students and researchers original contributions that comprise the debates, intersections and future courses of the field. It is divided in six themed sections: 1)Theories and Perspectives, 2) Cultural artefacts, Symbols and Social practices, 3) Public, Transnational, and Transitional Memories 4) Technologies of Memory, 5) Terror, Violence and Disasters, 6) and Body and Ecosystems. A strong emphasis is placed on the interdisciplinary breadth of Memory Studies with contributions from leading international scholars in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, biology, film studies, media studies, archive studies, literature and history. The Handbook addresses the core concerns and foundations of the field while indicating new directions in Memory Studies.

This book probes into how communities and social groups construct their understanding of the world through real and imagined experiences of place. The book seeks to connect the dots of the factual and the imaginary that form affective networks of identities, which help shape local memory and sense of self and community, as well as a sense of the past. It exploits the concept of make-believe spaces – in the environment, storytelling and mnemonic narratives – as a social framework that aligns and informs the everyday memory worlds of communities. Drawing upon fieldwork in cultural heritage, community archaeology, social history and conflict history and anthropology, this text offers a methodological framework within which social groups may position and enact the multiple senses of place and senses of the past inhabited and performed in different cultural contexts. This book serves to illustrate a useful visualisation methodology which can be used in participatory fieldwork and thus will be of interest to heritage specialists, ethnographers and cultural geographers and oral history practitioners who will particularly find the methodology cheap, easy to replicate and enjoyable for community-based projects.

German colonial history in today Tanzania Mainlad is extensively documented, but it has not been studied from its memory perspective despite it being widely remembered among the Tanzanians. This book documents German colonial memories as shared cultural legacy that exists in forms of monuments, archives and historical sites. It also presents them as trans-generational memory narratives that live in people's memories that are also commemorated in different ways like erection of war monuments. The book analyzes memories of colonialism from the historical perspective, showing how the collective memories like monuments and commemorations have undergone structural and institutional changes over time. The study uses Michael Rothberg's multi-directional theory, together with other theoretical approaches to analyze various forms of German colonial memories in Tanzanian context. The findings, which are analyzed historically, indicate that the collective memories of the Germans are cultural, communicative, commemorative, functional and topographical. They are also traumatic as well as nostalgic.

This volume examines the practice of memory in early modern Europe, showing that this was already a multimedia affair with many political uses, and affecting people at all levels of society; many pre-modern memory practices persist until today.

Advances in the engineering of sensing and acting capabilities distributed in wide range of specialized devices is providing at last an opportunity for the fundamental advances that computer science achieved in the past few decades to make an impact in our daily lives. This technical confluence is matched by a unique historical context where users are better informed (more aware of the benefits that technology can provide) and production of more complex systems is becoming more affordable. Sensors/actuators deployed in an environment (in this context it can be any physical space like a house, office, classroom, car, street, etc.) facilitate a link between an automated decision-making system connected to that technologically enriched space. This computing empowered environment enables the provision of an intelligent environment, i.e., "a digital environment that proactively, but sensibly, supports people in their daily lives". This is an active area of research which is attracting an increasing number of professionals (in academia and industry) worldwide. The prestigious 5th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE'09) is focused on the development of advanced intelligent environments and stimulates the discussion on several specific topics which are crucial to the future of the area. As part of that five workshops were supported as part of IE'09. This volume is the combined proceedings of those five workshops: Workshop on Digital Object Memories (DOMe'09), Workshop on RFID Technology: concepts, practices & solutions (RFID'09), Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Ambient Intelligence (AITAmI'09), Workshop on Ethical Design of Ambient Intelligence (EDAmI'09), Workshop on Smart Offices and Other Workplaces (SOOW'09).