historical memory essay

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

2 History and Memory

• Published: May 2011
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This chapter describes how memory has shaped the academic discipline of history. In the past two decades or so, ‘memory’ as a category to analyze and understand the relation of human beings to their past has become a nearly ubiquitous concept. Triggered jointly by the general crisis of representationalism and by a specific historical experience—the Holocaust—‘memory’ has replaced for some scholars a rather linear and monodimensional concept of ‘society’. Whereas in the past, memory was considered to be subjective and unreliable, it has now moved to centre-stage: it is in individual and collective memory that the past remains present in the contemporary agent. Memory, captured in methodological approaches such as oral history, also foregrounds the historical experience of ordinary people and thus carries the potential to counterbalance official, state-focused, and politically legitimate historical narratives, as well as those more broadly sanctioned by the academic enterprise.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• Google Scholar Indexing
• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

• Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• Andrew Goldstone
• Christopher Kark
• Christopher Warley
• Claire Seiler
• Eleanor Courtemanche
• Gregory Freidin
• Gregory Jusdanis
• Irakli Zurab Kakabadze
• Joseph Lease
• Meredith Ramirez Talusan
• Mike Chasar
• Roland Greene
• William Egginton
• William Flesch
• All Authors
• All Multimedia
• Republics of Letters

You are here

Morrison’s Things: Between History and Memory

by   Kinohi Nishikawa

Toni Morrison remains the most influential theorist of the black past in contemporary letters. Since the publication of  Beloved  and its companion essay “The Site of Memory” in 1987, Morrison has provided the impetus and vocabulary for those wishing to claim that the past is never past but always present. Indeed, the closest thing to a prevailing method in African American literary criticism could be described as the Morrisonian imperative to read how the past haunts the present, making itself known and felt among the living in ways both explicit and subtle. The field’s current keywords—aftermath, afterlife, repetition, and return—reflect that orientation. Christina Sharpe has gone so far as to describe the object of African American criticism as “the ditto ditto in the archives of the present.” [1]

Ironically, what’s been forgotten in this canonization of the Morrison of 1987 is that she began to formulate her engagement with the black past over a decade earlier, in a project for which she served as editor and makeshift curator of objects. In 1974 Random House brought out a book that Morrison had spent 18 months assembling with four collectors of black memorabilia. Though already a twice-published novelist, Morrison used her status as an influential editor at Random House to see the project through. The result was  The Black Book : a 200-page, oversized compendium that conveys the story of African and African-descended people in the New World, from the era of colonization, through the age of chattel slavery, and up to the waning days of Jim Crow. “Conveys” because  The Black Book  does not offer a textual narrative of events. Instead, it relies on pictures—that is, photographic reproductions of specific objects Morrison culled from her collaborators’ collections—to evoke what Sharpe has called the “total climate” of blacks’ experience of transatlantic slavery and its aftermath. [2]  The pictures tell their own story, one that is impressionistic rather than authoritative, fragmentary rather than whole. And that is the point. Unlike books written by academic historians, which tend to ascribe a telos to narratives about the past (i.e., from slavery to freedom), Morrison envisioned her work as a “genuine Black history book—one that simply recollected Black Life as lived.” [3]  This notion of recollection—of literally re-collecting and figuratively recollecting “Black history”—is the forgotten materialist basis of what Morrison would famously term “rememory” in 1987.

Though a wide body of scholarship has been built up around Morrison, surprisingly little has been written about  The Black Book . The oversight is odd since putting the volume together not only launched Morrison’s theorization of the black past but also introduced her to the source material for her best-known work. A nondescript clipping from the February 1856 issue of the  American Baptist  relates the story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who tried to kill her young children rather than have them grow up in bondage. Recounted by the Reverend P. S. Bassett, the episode is didactic, highlighting for a white abolitionist readership the impossible decisions enslaved people were compelled to make between freedom and survival. While this story has long been recognized as the inspiration for  Beloved , only the critic Cheryl A. Wall has devoted more than passing attention to its place in  The Black Book . Yet even she contends that the clipping’s significance lies in the way it prefigures  Beloved ’s imperative to read the past in the present. [4]  This despite the fact that the excerpt appears early in the book (page 10), when the reading experience is most disorienting, and is easily missed among two densely packed facing pages of clippings and text. Fifteen independent items—some photo-reproduced from original sources, others quoted and set in uniform type—crowd the layout. Smudges and other errors from the copying process further diminish the readability of the text. In the actual composition of  The Black Book , nothing makes Garner’s story stand out, which, again, is the point: it is merely one piece of the dizzying puzzle of history.

What was distinctive about Morrison’s engagement with the black past in 1974? How might a historicist obsession with 1987 obscure what she set out to do in  The Black Book ? I take a first step toward answering these questions in what follows. I propose that  The Black Book  advances a more contingent and discontinuous view of history than the one usually attributed to Morrison. This view, I argue, owes much to the book’s composition, which is pictorial and iconic rather than textual and discursive. By “flattening” history into a series of decontextualized images,  The Black Book encourages glossing, skipping pages, reading out of order, and finding meaning only in visual or “surface” resemblances. These (non-)reading practices are further encouraged by the fact that Morrison does not discriminate when it comes to identifying things that evoke the black past. Examples of black ingenuity and perseverance appear alongside those of racial parody and animus, while handcrafted wares and mass-produced commodities vie for attention in the same span of pages, confusing the distinction between folk and market. In short,  The Black Book  gives one access to the black past only through an inquisitive perusal—an actual looking at things. Accordingly, its view of history is premised on an awareness that readers’ grounding in the present is far from certain. Not everyone can or will want to engage  The Black Book ’s arrangement of things. What matters for Morrison, here and in her work to come, is not the fact of recovery but the question of how one re-collects the past at all.

The first thing to note about  The Black Book  is that it’s chock-full of text. Captions and explanatory notes appear underneath or alongside most pictures. Several types of documents—letters, certificates, applications—naturally feature handwritten or printed text. And newspaper clippings and other text-heavy ephemera take up a lot of space in the book, especially early on. Still, I would maintain that  The Black Book ’s composition is essentially pictorial insofar as it decouples “understanding” the text from reading it closely. Morrison lends meaning to any given thing by how she associates it with other things—on a single page, over facing pages, or across successive pages. Think of it like reading a museum catalog: the point is to get the gist of its visual organization, not to linger over every word.

At a pictorial level, certain layouts in  The Black Book  give a fairly coherent impression of the meaning behind the assembled artifacts. One facing-page layout, for example, combines the following: five fugitive slave ads printed in 1790; two undated classifieds, likely from the mid-1800s; W. H. Siebert’s 1896 historical map “‘Underground’ Routes to Canada”; Samuel Rowse’s 1850 lithograph  The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia ; and an 1857 letter from William Brinkl[e]y, one of Harriet Tubman’s associates in Delaware. All of these things appear under the bold heading “I rode a railroad that had no track. ” [5] True, the individual pictures are decontextualized (supporting information on the lithograph and Brinkley do not appear in  The Black Book ), with only Brown’s fugitive plot given an explanatory note. Still, the layout’s overall composition conveys the resolve and resourcefulness of fugitives from slavery as they ran toward freedom, as well as the desperate efforts of white enslavers to retrieve them. Sides are drawn, sympathies are channeled, and the “goal,” Canada, is clearly delineated. In this way, Morrison’s things not only document something called the Underground Railroad; they also evoke, in the present tense, what it would have meant and felt like for an enslaved person to take flight.

Yet the coherence of this particular display is a rarity in  The Black Book . Discordant juxtapositions are far more common, such that any impression of historical perspective is immediately undercut with confounding, contingent details. One page, for example, has a small photograph that shows a black woman holding a white infant in her lap. The original caption reads “Slave and Friend.” But printed next to this image are lyrics for “All the Pretty Little Horses,” and underneath both is Morrison’s clarification that the song is “an authentic slave lullaby [that] reveals the bitter feelings of Negro mothers who had to watch over their white charges while neglecting their own children.” Trying to exert a measure of control over the artifact and its description, Morrison inserts another artifact whose narrativization is supposed to guide the reader toward a “correct” reading of the image. Yet the page’s pictorial composition is irreducible to that gesture, for underneath this tableau are antebellum newspaper clippings addressing black westward expansion (one from the  New York Tribune , the other from the  Liberator ) and a maniculed notice prohibiting “the employment of free colored persons on water-craft navigating the rivers of [Arkansas].” [6]  What these artifacts have to do with each other from a historical perspective is a mystery. But their visual organization does elicit wonderfully weird associations, as one might detect between the white baby’s hand (clasped over the black woman’s) and the indexical manicule. 

This narratively incoherent but visually abundant mélange is not just a function of single-page compositions. It can be seen in facing-page layouts, as when a handwritten letter by Frederick Douglass defending his right to marry “a lady a few shades lighter in complexion than [himself]” appears directly opposite ledgers that list the human property of black enslaver John C. Stanley. It can be seen in successive pages, as is the case with the 16-page color insert, where minstrel-inspired advertising for commodities such as soap and baking powder gives way to photographs of the folk art and handiwork of enslaved people. And, perhaps most spectacularly, it can be seen on the front cover of the book itself (Figure 1): a riot of color and black-and-white images—36 in all—that practically asks (or begs) the question, What is this “black” in  The Black Book ? [7]

In earlier versions of this essay, I was tempted to read such confounding pictorial juxtapositions against the grain of Morrison’s intentions for the project. I assumed she had gathered these different things to make them useful to the present, only to find that their recombination failed to do so. I now think this reading is a mistake, an imposition of the way critics historicize Morrison circa 1987 onto her earlier, far more experimental, engagement with the black past. I now believe that the contingency and discontinuity of  The Black Book —in short, its refusal to make a teleological narrative available to readers—is its  raison d’être . Morrison was well aware that many of the things she had gathered from collections would perplex readers. But rather than force these artifacts into a historical arc, she made their achronicity, or their out-of-timeness, a feature of the book itself. How else can one explain its strange juxtapositions? They were by design, not some unintended consequence of a historicist project.

Morrison said as much in her contemporaneous essays on the project. In them she identified at least two ways in which her work departed from academic historiography. First, it questioned the ideological limitations of historians’ primary research site: the archive. The problem with conventional histories, Morrison implied, was that they were bound to the legitimizing procedures of institutional archives. As such, histories that relied on archives would inevitably reflect the interests and concerns of the powerful, or those deemed worthy of having their effects saved for posterity. By contrast, Morrison wanted  The Black Book  to give voice to the masses, or “people who had always been viewed only as percentages.” To do that, she turned her attention from scholars to collectors—that is, “people who had the original raw material documenting our life: posters, letters, newspapers, advertising cards, sheet music, photographs, movie frames, books, artifacts and mementos.” Collectors Middleton “Spike” Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith were respected keepers of such “raw material,” and so they became her preferred entry point into the black past. Morrison paid her collaborators the highest compliment she could think of when she said all four possessed “an intense love for black expression and a zest wholly free of academic careerism.” [8]

The second way Morrison departs from historiography followed from the first. By operating at the margins of institutional legitimation, collectors risked being cut off from institutional recognition. It was debatable whether collectors had a legitimate claim to history at all. Doesn’t  The Black Book  ultimately only reflect what four collectors of varying interests and dispositions had made available to Morrison? The volume’s most outspoken critic, cultural nationalist Kalamu Ya Salaam, made a similar point when he complained, “[T]o throw all of these images and documents together without a text to explain the meaning, context and original intent does not serve to help us truely [sic] understand what our history,  our real history of struggle  is about.” [9]  Yet Morrison would have welcomed the idea that Salaam did not glean “history,” much less a “history of struggle,” from her book. Historians, Morrison wrote, “habitually leave out life lived by everyday people”; in their writing, they seemed more concerned with “defend[ing] a new idea or destroy[ing] and old one.” [10]  She wanted  The Black Book  to convey something messier, murkier, less institutionally recognized about the black experience in the New World. Rather than a history, she aimed to put together a work of memory.

This goal helps explain  The Black Book ’s artifactual resemblance to a scrapbook. Although the print-heavy layout does suggest a catalog, the variety of pictorial forms—iconic, indexical, textual, and otherwise—makes the volume reminiscent of a collection of ephemera. This perception is lent further credence by the book’s introduction, in which none other than Bill Cosby muses: 

Suppose a three-hundred-year-old black man had decided, oh, say when he was about ten, to keep a scrapbook—a record of what it was like for himself and his people in these United States. He would keep newspaper articles that interested him, old family photos, trading cards, advertisements, letters, handbills, dreambooks, and posters—all sorts of stuff.

“No such man kept such a book,” Cosby observes, before adding, wryly, “But it’s okay—because it’s here, anyway.” [11] As if passed down through time by a mythic ancestor,  The Black Book  arrives in the contemporary reader’s hands like an anonymous scrapbook. It contains remnants that are random, ephemeral, incomplete—and, precisely because of that, it comes as close as possible to documenting “Black Life as lived.” The illusion being broached here is that of ordinary remembering, or everyday recollection. A scrapbook is indifferent to the sweeps and arcs (much less teloses) of capital “H” history. All it does is keep what an amateur historian decides to set down as worthy of recalling in the moment of composition. This is why when we “read” a scrapbook, we approach it not as a bird’s-eye chronicle but as what Pierre Nora has called a “site of memory” ( lieu de mémoire ) .[12]

Morrison’s commitment to ordinary remembering is so thoroughgoing that her name appears nowhere on or in  The Black Book . The collectors are credited with putting the book together, but even their names are absented from the cover. This is by design, of course, as it supports the illusion that the volume is authorless, the product of a collective mythos rather than a single guiding hand. The one decidedly personal indulgence Morrison allows herself is to insert an oval-shaped, black-and-white portrait of her mother, Ramah Wofford, on the front cover and in an illustrated tableau of anonymous subjects’ portraits .[13]  Nothing calls attention to her mother’s figure in either of these locations, or indeed to the fact that it is the ghost editor’s mother. Though she stares out at the reader, so do a number of the other figures among whom she is clustered. Thus, Wofford blends into the composition as just another picture in the collection. She is one memory among many.

Since 1987, critics have interpreted Morrisonian memory, or rememory, as  Beloved  terms it, as a charge to read the past in the present. The ethos of such criticism presumes a standpoint that can identify how contemporary circumstances are but an extension, or repetitive realization, of the past. Yet, having traced Morrison’s theorization of memory back to  The Black Book , I think this is only a partially correct reading of her work. Morrison did believe in something like collective memory, a sense of the past that bound people to one another in the present. But she consistently refused an absolute knowledge of the past, one that confirms what we believe we already know (Sharpe’s ditto ditto, for example). Instead, Morrison supposed that people could access collective memory only through fragments, traces, the detritus and hauntings of history. This stuff, for Morrison, possessed its own historical weight and was not assimilable to confident determinations of the past. In making  The Black Book , her intention was not to integrate readers into a discourse of “their history” but to confront them with buried memories—things in which they might not even recognize themselves. [14]

It may be fitting that, as I revised this essay for publication,  The Black Book  went out of and came back into print. The original 1974 edition had long been out of print, but the 2009 35 th  anniversary edition followed course in the late 2010s. That second disappearance turned  The Black Book  into something like one of the things it reproduces—a relic of the past, a memory among other memories. For a period, copies of the 2009 edition cost upwards of $150, and as much as $2,500, from online and antiquarian booksellers. Yet  The Black Book ’s obsolescence was short-lived. With the passing of Morrison in 2018 there came renewed demand for her work, including this long-overlooked book. 

The most recent edition (2019) is an artifact of our times. An image of the original cover, showing noticeable shelfwear, is set within a gray frame. The look approximates a well-worn family photo, as if the book itself is being memorialized. Morrison’s name appears front and top-center, her behind-the-scenes work on the project now highlighted in yellow. Yet there is one element that  is  ghosted from the previous editions: Bill Cosby’s introduction. The reasons for this are obvious, even though the exclusion is unannounced in the text. That the change was made at all—silently, posthumously—confirms Morrison’s intuition that history is not ditto ditto but contingent and discontinuous. Reading  The Black Book today is not the same as reading it in 1974, and that is the abiding point. 

[1]  Christina Sharpe,  In the Wake: On Blackness and Being  (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 82. Sharpe’s application of “ditto ditto” to the concept of the archive is adapted from her reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s  Zong! (2008).

[2]  Sharpe, 104-5.

[3]  Toni Morrison, “Behind the Making of  The Black Book ,”  Black World , February 1974, 89.

[4]  Cheryl A. Wall, “Reading  The Black Book : Between the Lines of History,”  Arizona Quarterly  68, no. 4 (2012): 105-30.

[5]  Middleton Harris, et al.,  The Black Book  (New York: Random House, 1974), 68-69.

[6]  Ibid., 65.

[7]  Ibid., 24-25, 89-104, front cover. The last part of this paragraph riffs on Stuart Hall’s field-shaping essay, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in  Black Popular Culture , ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 21-33.

[8]  Toni Morrison, “Rediscovering Black History,”  New York Times Book Review , August 11, 1974, 16.

[9]  Kalamu ya Salaam, review of  The Black Book , by Middleton Harris, et al.,  Black Books Bulletin , 3, no. 1 (1975): 73.

[10]  Morrison, “Behind,” 88.

[11]  Bill Cosby, “Introduction,” in  The Black Book , v.

[12]  Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History:  Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7-24. The subtitle of my essay, and the distinction between history and memory I draw on here, is indebted to this piece.

[13]  Harris, front cover, 196-97.

[14]  This point about (non-)recognition echoes Christopher Freeburg’s analysis of  The Black Book  as fostering a “personalized and contingent” black interiority rather than subjecting readers to a predetermined historical script. Christopher Freeburg,  Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life  (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 130.

Join the Colloquy

Thing Theory in Literary Studies

View the discussion thread.

Covering books and digital resources across all fields of history

ISSN 1749-8155

Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject

Officially, the designated revolution that took place in historical theory since the Second World War is that of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. But as the postmodernist era in historical theory begins to fade, one begins to wonder if the real revolution in post-war historical theory actually consisted of the rise of memory studies. As the editor of this collection points out in her introduction, ‘Memory is now as familiar a category for historians as politics, war or empire’ (p. 1). The rise of memory studies began at the turn of the 1970s, and the reasons for its rise are multifarious. The Holocaust and the idea of the ‘duty to remember’ undoubtedly played a part, as did some of the new social history of the 1960s; the decline of positivism’s standing in historical method and the ‘cultural turn’ must also be taken into account. One might say that, ‘taking all of the aforementioned factors together, that the ‘memory boom’ of recent years has been over-determined’ (p. 5). Nonetheless, regardless from whence it sprung, the point is that memory is now an inescapable feature of the historiographical landscape.

The collection under review is published as part of The Routledge Guides to Using Historical Sources series; and unsurprisingly, the introduction argues that what distinguishes the volume from other introductions to history and memory is its focus on sources. The volume is divided into three sections, with the first looking at working with oral testimonies; the second deals with memorialisation and commemoration; while the third examines the intersections between individual and collective memory. A select bibliography is provided for all three areas at the end of the book.

One of the key critical issues in the area of memory studies is the reception of memory, with more than one commentator arguing that not enough has been done to address the issue. Most historical studies of memory ‘favour analysis of the textual, visual or oral representations of the past over the pursuit of evidence for responses to those cultural artifacts’ (p. 8). The issue of reception is touched upon in several of the essays in Memory and History . Polly Low looks at the use of inscribed monuments in Ancient Athens to examine not only what the Athenians were attempting to communicate with these monuments; but also whether their attempts were successful. However, the evidence for whether the attempts were successful is slim, and the answer to the question is left somewhat opaque; commemorative monuments ‘may well have been set up with specific intentions, but it does not follow that they were always or only used for those purposes’ (p. 81). In her essay on the role that photography plays in museums, Susan A. Crane asks ‘how did the inclusion of photographs in museums shape the way that diverse audiences, from curators to scholars to the visiting public, interacted with the visual presence of the past?’ (p. 123). But as with Low’s chapter on Athenian monuments, the essay by and large focuses on what those who exhibited the photographs intended them to portray, as opposed to how said photographs were received by their audience. Audience reception is only really addressed in the last two pages of the chapter. Finally, Jason Crouthamel admits on the second page of his chapter on the characterisation of ‘shellshock’ in the Weimar Republic that ‘individual memory proves to be more difficult to locate and analyze’ – although to be fair it should be noted that Crouthamel is more successful in trying to present the reception of memory than either Crane or Low (p. 144). Nonetheless, the impression one gets from Memory and History is that the gauging the reception of memory is a highly problematic affair which even the doyens of the field have struggled to get to grips with. In her introduction Tumblety states that the aim of the volume is to ‘animate and interrogate’ rather than resolve outstanding problems – but with regards to the reception of memory, animation seems thin on the ground.

A theme that runs throughout the entire collection – or ‘haunts’ the volume as Tumblety puts it (like a spectre perhaps?) – is the problematic notion of collective memory. In Lindsey Dodd’s chapter on French oral history during the Second World War (by far the best essay in the book), the author emphasises the importance of ‘cultural scripts’. If there is a gap between individual memories and ‘public’ forms of remembering, then the individual may be left feeling alienated as a result (p. 37). The Allied bombing of France during the Second World War has been described a ‘black hole’ with regard to French collective memory of the war: Dodd’s doctoral research found that it was fairly well remembered at a local/individual level, but a silence prevails at a public and institutional level (p. 37). On Dodd’s reading, public memory acts as a kind of ‘jelly mould’ that shapes personal memories; with no such mould to hand, the individuals memories will be shapeless, and in the case of Dodd’s interviewee, coalesce around other psychological landmarks.

Continuing the theme, Rosanne Kennedy’s essay ‘Memory, history and the law’ examines the role of the law in shaping collective memory. The Nuremberg trials chose documentation over testimony with regard to the evidence, and therefore did not significantly contribute to the collective memory of the Holocaust. By contrast, the trial of Albert Eichmann in 1961 was designed almost as more of an exercise in collective memory than as a trial (1) ; lead prosecutor Gideon Hauser allowed witnesses to present narratives – opposed to the usual courtroom fare of question and answer – and the trial was significant in ‘bringing Holocaust survivors, who had been marginalised in Israeli society, into the forefront of national consciousness, and making the Holocaust central to national identity and remembrance in Israel’ (p. 55). As Peter Novick has noted, ‘collective memory works selectively; it is a form of myth-making that is shaped by the needs of groups, and the formation of group identity, in the present’ (p. 57). A historical approach to the past recognises the complexity of events, whereas memory tends to simplify – shaping the past to fit within the jelly mould of a cultural script. I will return to the tension between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ shortly.

Another theme raised in this collection is the idea of visual memory. Franziska Seraphim makes the obvious, but nonetheless important point that images function differently from texts; ‘we see with memory … Images tend to tap into the habits of mind (as distinct from critical thinking) … to make sense’ (p. 98). Similarly, Joan Tumblety documents how the image of resistance fighters in post-war France was cultivated through films which were ‘often publically funded and controlled’ (p. 109). Such films functioned as historical sources ‘in the absence of much written material about that had been of necessity secret’ (p. 109). Tumblety also examines the written form of memory in her essay, through an examination of the challenge to official memory via the written memoirs of those ‘with an axe to grind about the present regime and its alleged manipulation of the past’ (p. 115).

The final essay deals with the idea of memory and materiality. (2) Susan M. Stabile puts it that a palimpsest is not only a material object, but also a metaphor for memory. (3) The original ‘inscription’ – the act itself – is erased and forgotten, and thus lived experience is deposited in memory, and reposited in narrative (p. 194). But memory changes with each iteration, ‘shaped by the moment in which it is recalled. That recollection will be overwritten at a future moment, shadowed by a new memory’ (p. 194). The past therefore, only exists as a fragment or ruin – or if you’re a fan of Hayden White, as synecdoche. But traces of the past survive in what has come to be known as a ‘cumulative palimpsest’. In the words of Geoff Bailey, ‘successive episodes of deposition … remain superimposed one upon the other without loss of evidence, but are so re-worked and mixed together that it is difficult or impossible to separate them out into their original constituents’ (p. 195). Stabile’s essay examines 19th-century antiquarian John Watson, and in particular his perpetuation of colonial ruins through a relic box. Material culture is a palimpsest – ‘the literal things that people leave behind…material culture embodies and evokes memory’ (p. 197).

I spoke above of the tension between history – as in academic history – and memory. The historian has often been sceptical of oral testimony; Anna Wieviorka makes the case that the Eichmann trial was crucial in legitimising testimony as an epistemically acceptable form of truth telling about the past – and that this had a negative impact on historical writing. The Holocaust thus came ‘to be defined as a succession of individual experiences with which the public was supposed to identify’ (p. 56). The problem is that this is not a particularly good foundation for writing history; D. J. Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners is probably the most high profile example of this. One can learn a lot from listening to personal testimonies – ‘but does one learn history?’ (p. 57). At the other end of the pendulum, Pierre Nora felt that history had been a bad thing for memory; ‘true’ memory has been obliterated by ‘modern’ memory – the latter consisting of ‘the practise of oral history, heritage, commemoration, archives and genealogy’ (p. 160). There are some commentators however, who occupy a position somewhere between these two poles, James Young feels that the distinction between history and memory – ‘history as that which happened, memory as that which is remembered of what happened’ – is somewhat forced (p. 58). Similarly, Hannah Ewence contends at the start of her essay that ‘Nora establishes between history and memory appear fabricated and unnecessarily provocative, overlooking the ways in which history and memory can, and do, successfully overlap and crossfertilize’ (p. 160). Even ‘atomized memory’ uses the materials and milestones of ‘official’ memory to construct and reconstruct the past (p. 161).

It is the tension between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ that provides the jumping off point for Ewence’s essay ‘Memories of suburbia: autobiographical fiction and minority narratives’. Ewence studies three autobiographical novels to not only make the point that history, memory and fiction share points of similarity; but also as a means of introducing the idea of the ‘spatial turn’ – ‘ideas about space and place are encoded with individual and collective identity(ies), memories and histories’ (p. 162). All three novels contain autobiographical elements, but their respective authors have resisted attempts to draw explicit parallels with their own lives – and the fact that they are not straightforward autobiographies is one of their strengths, as ‘Fiction alone has the capacity, perhaps the audacity, to challenge history … whilst autobiography typically prefers to “save face”’ (p. 169). In all three novels, a clear sense of space is ‘fundamental within their writing as a site for exploring history, memory and identity’ (p. 172). Fiction allows authors to explore and deposit memory, and readers can draw upon their own memories to evoke their own past experiences; and to an extent it allows the negation of power structures that determine what history can be told by whom in a way that sometimes oral history cannot.

One of the interesting things about this collection is the lack of reference made to those we might call some of the doyens of postmodernism. I recently had a rather spirited exchange with Alun Munslow in these pages over whether postmodernism was on the wane or not. (4) It could be argued that the absence of the likes of Derrida and Barthes from these pages might be taken as an indicator that the postmodernist turn in historical theory is on the decline. In a review of a similar work on memory a few years ago, Patrick Hutton noted that the ‘diminishing enthusiasm among historians for postmodernist theory’ might prompt a ‘return to the old and very practical historiographical problems of testimony, evidence, and interpretation’. (5) The approach and contents of Memory and History would suggest that this has indeed taken place.

Memory and History provides an interesting cross-section of essays from the front-line of memory studies; but its broadly based empiricist tone is both the book’s main strength and weakness, depending on your predilections in these matters. If you tend towards the view that historical theory should be aligned more closely with historical practice, then this collection of essays will be seen as a step in the right direction. If on the other hand, one inclines towards what we might call the Wulf Kansteiner/ Jörn Rüsen end of the spectrum, then there will be a woeful lack of theory in this one for your tastes, and a quick retreat to the pages of History and Memory journal may be necessary.

• I am aware of the anachronism of using the term ‘collective memory’ here. Back to (1)
• Although this is addressed tangentially in chapters one and four as well. Back to (2)
• For the uninitiated, a palimpsest is ‘Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed to be reusable after any writing on it has been erased’. Definition taken from the Oxford English Dictionary . Back to (3)
• See < http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1356 > [accessed 3 June 2013]. Back to (4)
• Patrick H. Hutton, ‘Memories of trauma: problems of interpretation’, History and Theory , 43 (2004), 258. Back to (5)

Author's Response

I would like to thank the reviewer for his close reading of the volume. It is not my intention in this response to take issue with any element of the review; rather to reflect on a few of the general comments made in it about the apparent wane of (postmodernist) theorising in the discipline of history. I agree with the reviewer that the edited volume is broadly empiricist in tone, as well as in method. And I think he is right to suggest that it will more readily satisfy those who like to see their theory closely aligned with historical practice. This is indeed deliberate, not least because Memory and History sits within the Routledge Using Historical Sources series, whose remit is not to exclude – if neither solely to address – an audience of undergraduate and post-graduate students, as well as non-specialist scholars working in the Anglophone university sphere, who may well turn to the book for pointers about how to approach the study of memory through extant primary material rather than for a theoretical Weltanschauung .  That is why the chapters consider distinct genres of source – letters, photography, fiction, trial testimony, etc. – as well as disparate periods and places.

Yet, as the reviewer suggests, the request for some kind of systematic theorization within memory studies has been a common refrain in the scholarly literature. This is not necessarily a demand for theorising memory itself (although that has been common enough, especially where collective memory is concerned); rather, it is a conviction that getting a handle on the multiple, and perhaps interpenetrating analytical frameworks within which ‘memory’ of one kind or another has been, or can be, understood across a range of disciplines, enables a more rigorous and dialogic engagement among scholars.(1) And it has also been a plea for a historicisation of the notion of memory itself, as the introduction to the volume explores.

What strikes me about the most serious, systematic and – above all – influential attempts in English to theorize memory in this way, however, is that they have emanated from sociologists, or sociologically inclined historians – such as Jeffrey Olick and Wulf Kansteiner – who generally bypass the long-lived engagement within literary criticism and some kinds of intellectual history with (largely French) structuralist or post-structuralist theories of language. Thus while a few foundational works in the field draw in some measure on the work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida (and these theorists find some echo in current scholarship), I would say that the loudest scholarly conversations in memory studies over the last two decades or so – precisely the period of the cross-disciplinary fight over the value of postmodernist approaches – barely mention them. (2) Instead, it is the significance for the field of the writings of early sociologists such as Maurice Halbwachs and Emile Durkheim that is stressed in the great volume of scholarly writing on memory. And although Marek Tamm has recently championed the semiotically inclined works of continental European writers on memory such as Astrid Erll, the central plank of his argument – that historians would do well to deploy a notion of ‘mnemohistory’ in their work; in other words to become attuned to ‘the two levels he [the historian] is simultaneously working on: the historicisation of the phenomenon of the past and the historicisation of his own work’ – does not depend overtly on post-structuralist insights.(3)

Clearly, one does not need postmodernism (or its component part, post-structuralism) in order to theorise memory. And neither does one need postmodernism, I would argue, in order to identify and to explain the impact of the so-called linguistic turn on the development of memory studies and on the historical discipline as a whole, however much scholars continue to conflate the ‘linguistic turn’ with ‘[t]he deconstructionist impulse of postmodernism’.(4) The epistemologically radical refusal of objective truth, so associated with post-structuralist approaches to language, is worlds away from the kind of linguistic turn made famous after the late 1960s by the outstanding historian of early modern political thought, Quentin Skinner, whose methodology drew instead on the ‘speech act’ theories of British analytical philosopher John Austin.(5) In any case, the generalisation within the discipline of the insight that our evidence is almost always in some sense rhetorically constructed – an appreciation that has undoubtedly nourished the scholarly memory boom – is as characteristic of what some postmodernist historians call ‘constructivist’ history writing as of ‘deconstructionist’ varieties.(6) It is not so much that postmodernism is on the wane in studies of memory, as that it never secured a foothold there in the first place.

Ultimately, I am in two minds about the value of systematic theorising. While rigour in the thinking and writing about memory – or any subject – should prevent the facile replication of buzz words wrenched free from any meaningful intellectual or other context, I sometimes wonder whether the drive towards systematisation that characterises some sociological investigation on the subject might not lead to a new positivism for the 21st century, something that in fact runs counter to the very scholarly trends that enabled the rise of ‘memory studies’ in the first place, at least among mainstream historians. Like the temptation to draw on recent discoveries in neuroscience as a potential arbiter of ‘what memory really means’, there is a danger that we permit a new essentialism to take hold.(7) Better, I would think, for historians to work towards a more conceptually reflective and robust kind of empiricism. This is what is offered by Neil Gregor in his recent social history of memory in post-war Nuremberg, an ‘empirically saturated study’ of grassroots memorial cultures whose immersion in source material that speaks to the words and deeds of those enmeshed in local networks, manages practically to collapse – and thus to resolve – one entrenched methodological divide in the field of memory, that between the representational and the experiential. (8)

(1) See The Collective Memory Reader , ed. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford and New York, NY, 2011), and especially the lengthy attempt to systematise what – and how – we know about memory in its introduction, pp. 3–62.

(2) Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge, 2011 [orig. German edition 1999]) draws on Roland Barthes’ theories of the image and Jacques Derrida’s approach to the ‘archive’. In Caroline Wake, ‘Regarding the recording: the viewer of video testimony, the complexity of coprescence and the possibility of tertiary witnessing’, History and Memory, 25, 1 (2013), 111–44, the ideas of both Barthes and Derrida, despite being cited, take a back seat to the author’s engagement with the works of intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra and sociologist Shanyang Zhao.

(3) Marek Tamm, ‘Beyond history and memory: new perspectives in memory studies’, History Compass, 11, 6 (2013), 458–73; here 464. Tamm is consciously building on the approach of Jan Assmann, which in turn is in part derived from the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

(4) Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘A Looming crash or a soft landing? Forecasting the future of the memory “industry”’, The Journal of Modern History, 81, 1 (2009), 134. See also Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), who seems to conflate postmodernism with what is often called the ‘new cultural history’, pp. 243–9, in his discussion of the work of Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Darnton.

(5) Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory , 8, 1 (1969), 3–53.

(6) These are two of the main categories used to describe tendencies within historical scholarship in The Nature of History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow (London, 2004).

(7) For engagement with neuroscience, see several contributions to Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates , ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York, NY, 2010).

(8) Neil Gregor, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past, (New Haven, CT and London, 2008), p. 20.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Future Fables
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Just the Right Book
• Lit Century
• The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
• New Books Network
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

Memory vs. History: On the Neverending Struggle to See Clearly Into the Past

Sarisha kurup tries to map the personal over the public.

In autumn of 1993, as River Phoenix convulsed on a Los Angeles sidewalk, his body riddled with cocaine and morphine, my father sat somewhere in San Francisco, only four years older than the child star who would forever be 23.

Bill Clinton had just become president and a van had exploded outside the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring over 1,000. Rodney King testified against the four LAPD officers that brutally beat him, sending two of them to prison. Rivers flooded the American Midwest all April; the IRS granted the Church of Scientology full tax exemption; and my father tucked himself away in the Silicon Valley, making computer chips for Cirrus Logic.

My mother tells me these details over a broken phone signal. She still lives in the Bay Area, where she moved in August of 1994, and met my father only a month later. Today I am in a hotel room in Amsterdam, and I can barely ask her any of my questions because we rarely talk about him directly. I find myself stuttering, the words dissolving on my tongue. The easiest way to ask these questions is in a steady, emotionless voice, like an automated message.

What he was doing that autumn, how he spent his free time, who he called on an empty evening, what time he fell asleep, if he slept much at all—it’s all a mystery. He never kept any journals. He rarely changed his wardrobe throughout his adult life, so I can imagine, at least, how he dressed. Light wash jeans, black or brown belt, the kind of polo shirts where the shoulders hang down to mid upper arm. The printed photos in our family albums are not dated, and there are few of my father before he met my mother. She was always the photographer.

Photos of River Phoenix in 1993 are plentiful and, now, strange. His hair is long, blonde—the kind of hair one looks at in hindsight and laughs—his smile is mischievous. He doesn’t look like he should be in the last year of life. And yet, the night before Halloween, outside a club in Los Angeles, his younger brother placed a shaky 911 call and by the time the paramedics had arrived, River Phoenix was in cardiac arrest.

When people die young, it is often said that they are frozen in time. That while all their peers age and turn soft and grey, they will forever exist in photos and our minds just as they did in their last days. But I think there are people like River Phoenix, people who are so famous whose names roll off everyone’s tongues, people who, when they die, freeze even the time around them. We don’t all understand time the way historians do, and even they cannot control all of what we remember. Memory is inexplicable and selective, and nostalgia is strong. As the past collapses and scatters into something messier, less linear, we collectively remember only the road markers, the people and the things that cut the deepest.

Nineteen ninety-three will always belong to River Phoenix: frozen the moment he lost consciousness on the filthy sidewalk of the Sunset Strip. My memories do not extend to 1993, and yet when I think of that year I think of Johnny Depp and his band singing inside The Viper Room as River Phoenix slips from life just steps away, without them knowing, out in the evening air.

They found JFK Jr.’s body 120 feet below the surface of the Atlantic in July of 1999, only a few months after I was born. My father lived with me and my mother in a rented house then. On the day that John Jr’s plane went down the house was crowded with relatives who stumbled over each other in the little space, cooing and clapping to get the attention of the new baby. My father had started his own company only two years earlier. I understood very little about technology growing up, and still can’t wrap my head around the way most machines work, so I could never explain much to people who asked what it was that my father did. But I could say he helmed a tech company that was called Vitalect. There are photos from this period in his life, and videos too. My mother was the videographer, and the moving images are shot from her perspective. When you watch them you can see the way she must have seen us—a thirty-three-year-old man and a six-month-old baby, both with the same dimple indented into our left cheeks.

When his plane hit the Atlantic, JFK Jr. died on impact. They didn’t find his body until three days later. At the site of the wreckage he was still buckled in, trapped in the pilot’s seat. His family scattered his ashes in the Atlantic. I always thought this was strange—giving him back to the very thing that took him.

We scattered my father’s ashes at the base of the orange tree in our backyard. He loved that tree. It was heavy with fruit each December without fail, and on early grey mornings you could find him there, reaching up among the branches.

I often think of 1999 as my year. The year I wrote down on every document and form. I asked my mother how my father had spent 1999, and she said—as if it were the most obvious thing in the world— Well, it was the year you were born!

But I am a historian now, and I know that 1999 was the year that Bill Clinton was acquitted; the year Bill Gates became the richest man in the world; the year of a total solar eclipse. And yet the last year of the century still belongs to JFK Jr., the boy who saluted his father’s casket on his third birthday. His father, the man who froze 1963.

Did the news of JFK Jr.’s death shake the foundations of the rented house on Teal Street? My mother can’t recall, but it had always been my father who was deeply political, and I can’t imagine it hadn’t crossed his mind once or twice. The Kennedy Curse! Was he being bred for office? Was there some sort of conspiracy? The whole world was asking questions, but my parents weren’t ones to read the tabloids. My mother’s journals don’t cover this; there are no answers to find.

In January of 2008, my mother was preparing to leave California to go overseas for a month to bury her father. My father was preparing for a month of lone-parenting, meanwhile in his apartment in SoHo, Heath Ledger was overdosing on prescription medication. His housekeeper and his masseuse found him unconscious in bed, and their first call was to Mary Kate Olsen (not the paramedics, not 911), who sent them the number of a private security guard. By the time medical professionals arrived on the scene, Heath Ledger was dead. An Associated Press poll reported that news of his death was voted the top entertainment story of 2008. Promotional material for The Dark Knight, which was to be released later that year, had to be scrapped and re-done. A career high suddenly turned into a career end.

My father, like any good Democrat, knew to list Brokeback Mountain as a favorite movie. I’m certain he must have considered Heath Ledger’s death. I was old enough by then to leave my mother’s side while she perused aisles in the grocery store and instead make my way to the shelf of magazines. That month, I’m sure, his face plastered every one. Retrospectives, investigations, timelines. I imagine it was as if everyone’s breath caught at once.

Two thousand and eight was a good year for our family. My father’s company was doing well, and so was my mother’s magazine. We went on our first and only family cruise that summer. This is the first family vacation I can actually remember. I can see my father in his orange swimming trunks, floating on his back in the chlorine-blue water. I imagine he must have been happy, though I can’t really say for sure.

I once asked my mother to tell me how they’d met, something beyond the bare-bones story of a college reunion picnic at a California park. Had he dated anyone else before her? You should have asked him, she said, refusing to budge. I don’t know why she locks away these stories.

In autumn of 2016, my father died halfway across the world while doing press for his new book. I hadn’t seen him in months. He’d been having heart problems and strokes for two years before he finally gave in, but my memory around his death is blurry, perhaps because I never knew the exact circumstances or because I don’t want to remember, some coping mechanism of my brain. I’m not sure, but it’s never felt fair to ask my mother to relive it. He was already sick, and I think he fell out of his bed, which shocked his heart or his brain or something. I was never much of a doctor.

There was nothing I could do as I watched my father slip away. He didn’t freeze 2016. Two thousand and sixteen kept going, and I was still in school, still writing papers, still applying to colleges: helplessly watching as he recessed into time. How beautiful and devastating, to let things become the past.

Eventually, some weeks after his death, I took my journal to a café and wrote down every memory I had of him, cataloguing and archiving all that I could. By the end of it, I finally cried for him, for the first time. It was then that the act of writing became so important that it was essential, the most concrete form of remembering, and even then, sometimes, it wasn’t enough. I can’t remember who I was before my father died, what I cared about, what I knew to be right and wrong. I can’t remember the specificities of our relationship; my own memory collapses into flashes of moments and images with no linear narrative. I write what I can, but memory is not as as simple as a story, or an essay, or the collection of home videos we have on VHS tapes.

Historian Timothy Snyder writes about the difference between memory and history. Finding them distinctly opposed, he writes that “memory exists in first person. If there isn’t a person, there isn’t a memory. Whereas history exists above all in second or third person.”

I can tell you so much about how River Phoenix died, about the investigations and lawsuits that ensued. I can tell you more about JFK Jr’s final morning than my father’s. I’ve read Heath Ledger’s autopsy report, but I don’t know if my father even had one. (Do they do that for people who can’t or don’t freeze time?) I can tell you what each one of these men was wearing when he died. I cannot say the same about my father. With men like River, John Jr, and Heath, history and memory converge. To be so famous and vivid is to be memory and fact at once. Indisputable. Immutable.

Two thousand and sixteen probably belongs to people like that, to David Bowie, or Prince, or someone whose face people will never forget and will never be allowed to forget. When my mother is gone, much of my father will go with her. She knew him for 21 years of his life—nearly half of it. I knew him for 17, but my memories are already faint and fallible, and I recall less of the years before he got sick with every passing day. My children will never know him.

Since he died it has been my mission to turn memory into history. I photograph, I paint, I journal, and most importantly, I write. Everything must be archived; I do it for some undetermined future reader, researcher, historian. I am equally enchanted and repelled by the passage of time. Nothing can render something beautiful like the past, and yet, I know intimately the pain that can come of the march forward. Not everyone can freeze time; some are simply swept away.

Perhaps all the writing, all the archiving, is only delaying the inevitable. Sometimes I have to remind myself that my father is not a historical figure; he is not a 90s heartthrob, or the son of a president, or an adored, tragic actor. No one is languishing over the fact that he never kept a journal, or that he didn’t take many photographs, or that I can no longer recall the exact contours of his face from memory. And yet I can’t stop writing his history.

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Sarisha Kurup

Previous article, next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

Booksellers! Apply for an International Bookselling Fellowship

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Site Content

Memory, trauma, and history.

Essays on Living with the Past

Michael S. Roth

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: November 2011

ISBN: 9780231145695

Format: Paperback

List Price: $34.00 £28.00

Shipping Options

Purchasing options are not available in this country.

ISBN: 9780231145688

Format: Hardcover

List Price: $110.00 £92.00

ISBN: 9780231521611

Format: E-book

List Price: $33.99 £28.00

• EPUB via the Columbia UP App
• PDF via the Columbia UP App

Roth rules! A compulsive peeper into the corners of the historical past, he is the visual historian's historian. Not only because Roth is smart, not only because he finds odd things that captured people's attention in the past, not only because he is theoretically sophisticated without being dogmatic, but also because as a thinker and writer he is always able to engage his audience on every topic. Sander L. Gilman, Emory University

With critical agility and grace, Roth's life-affirming and judicious work urges us to absorb the critical lessons of postmodern irony and resist the lure of cold and superior sophistication in favor of efforts to find meaning in ever renewed inquiries into who we think we are and what we want to be. Carolyn J. Dean, Brown University, author of Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust

In this excellent work, Roth provides sobering antidotes to recent hyperboles, claiming the most abject forms of victimization and trauma have recently become the ultimate forms of legitimation. A lucid, boldly interdisciplinary book, Roth's work will stimulate exchange among historians, critical theorists, literary critics, students of visual culture, and all readers concerned about the fate of liberal education. Dominick La Capra, Cornell University

This collection revises our normal conceptions of the relation between 'history' and 'the past.' Roth's essays challenge us to rethink the links among history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the body. Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz

exceptional and wide-ranging Robert Eaglestone, Times Higher Education

Not only does it stand out as a profound interdisciplinary study on the multilayered facets of (collective) memory and its (re)construction, but it is in itself a valuable record of contemporary discourses on memory, since its essays were written over more than twenty years. David Kerler, Modern Language Review

• Read a review from the Times Higher Education Supplement.
• Read a review from the Wesleyan Argus.

About the Author

• World History
• European Literature
• Literary Studies
• Continental Philosophy
• Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Theory

History, Memory, and Monuments:   An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration

Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh

            “Monuments are good for nothing,” a North Carolina Congressman declared in 1800.    In the founding years of the United States, many argued that democracy and the spread of literacy had made commemorative rituals and monuments obsolete, a leftover from the days of monarchy and superstition.   Reflecting on Congress’s reluctance to fund a monument to George Washington, John Quincy Adams famously observed   that “democracy has no monuments.”    “True memory,” many Americans liked to claim, lay not in a pile of dead stones but in the living hearts of the people.

            Since those early days of the Republic, democracy has changed its tune.   Commemoration has become utterly commonplace, deeply rooted in the cultural practices of the nation.   Not only did Americans come to embrace traditional forms of commemoration, but they pioneered new practices, particularly in the remembrance of war dead.   Today American commemorative practices have multiplied and spread in ways no one could have imagined, extending now even into the solar system (with a monument to the fallen Columbia crew on Mars).

            While commemorative practices have been expanding for nearly two centuries, the academic literature on commemoration has mushroomed in the past twenty years.   So many scholars from such a variety of disciplines have joined the “memory boom” that mapping the field has become effectively impossible.   Moreover, scholars often talk at cross purposes with one another or simply in ignorance of each other’s work.   This essay, while by necessity impressionistic, will try to pinpoint key questions, debates, findings, and trends.

            The first key question might be, what is commemoration?   Dictionary definitions tell us that to commemorate is to “call to remembrance,” to mark an event or a person or a group by a ceremony or an observance or a monument of some kind.   Commemorations might be ephemeral or permanent ;   the key point is that they prod collective memory in some conspicuous way.

            French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs ushered in the modern academic study of collective memory with his book The Social Frameworks of Memory (1925) in which he argued that all memory – even personal memory – is a social process, shaped by the various groups (family, religious, geographical, etc.)   to which individuals belong.   In an even more influential posthumous essay, “Historical Memory and Collective Memory” (1950), published after his death in a Nazi concentration camp, Halbwachs insisted on a distinction between history and collective memory: history aims for a universal, objective truth severed from the psychology of social groups while “every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time.”   Thus our view of the past does not come primarily from professional historical scholarship but from a much more complicated and interwoven set of relationships to mass media, tourist sites, family tradition, and the spaces of our upbringing with all their regional, ethnic, and class diversity – to name just a few factors.   Just as personal memory is now understood to be a highly selective, adaptive process of reconstructing the past, shaped by present needs and contexts, so collective memory is a product of social groups and their ever evolving character and interests.   Hence the now commonplace notion that collective memory is “constructed,” amidst a perpetual political battleground.   Almost everyone now agrees with American historian Michael Kammen’s assertion, made in his magisterial volume Mystic Chords of Memory (1991) that “societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind – manipulating the past in order to mold the present.”

            Yet even when collective memory is qualified in this way, many scholars remain skeptical of the notion.   In a 2001 essay on “ The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies” social historian Jay Winter asserted that we need “a more rigorous and tightly argued set of propositions about what exactly memory is, and what it has been in the past.”   Some scholars even question the existence of collective memory.   The very idea of collective memory seems to assume a unity of purpose – as if many different people somehow share a common mind – that belies the reality of even the smallest family group, let alone a diverse nation like the U.S.   James Wertsch has argued in Voices of Collective Remembering (2002) that collective memory is not a thing in itself but many different acts of remembering, shaped by overarching social forces and cognitive frameworks such as narrative. Susan Sontag in her final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2002) went even further and argued that there isn’t a collective memory at all but there is “collective instruction,” a complex process – left mostly unexplained in her book – by which certain ideas and images become more important than others.

            “We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left,” French scholar Pierre Nora has famously argued ( Realms of Memory , orig. 1984).   Nora claimed that modern societies invest so heavily in “lieux de memoire” [memory sites, such as monuments, museums, archives, and historic places] because these have replaced “real environments of memory,” the living memory that was once nourished spontaneously in premodern societies.   Nora’s claim echoes the anti-monument rhetoric of early American republicans.   Like the republicans before him, Nora suspected that modern commemorations were invented to make up for a lack of organic unity within modern nations and societies.   David Lowenthal’s book The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985) made a similar point, arguing that modern societies try desperately to resurrect the past because it has already disappeared from living culture.   While this core insight has been productive – modernity does indeed disrupt old patterns of collective memory – it is also reductive, failing to take into account not only the importance of commemoration in premodern societies but also the persistence of the past and “spontaneous” practices of memory in modern societies such as the U.S.  

            Nora’s attention to sites of memory and the politics surrounding them has had a profound influence on American scholarship, but many scholars who cite him simply ignore or overlook the assumptions that underpin his work.   Whatever their theoretical allegiances, scholars keep circling around the same basic questions.   Who guides the process of remembering and towards what ends?   Why do specific commemorative projects take particular forms?   How do commemorative practices actually shape social relations and cultural beliefs (rather than simply reflecting them)?   Inevitably this last question raises the key issue of how conspicuous acts of commemoration like public ceremonies and monument building relate to the more everyday practices of schooling, reminiscing, and unconscious habit that carry knowledge and tradition from one generation to another.   This question is the least directly addressed issue, probably because it is the hardest to research, though it haunts much of the scholarship on memory.

            In the U.S. the “memory boom” seems to have been inspired largely by two phenomena: the coming to grips with the Holocaust, which began in earnest in the 1970s, and the unexpected success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982.   While the literature on Holocaust memory is now vast and intricate, James E. Young’s book The Texture of Memory (1993) has become indispensable.   Focusing on the unique problems posed by the trauma of the Holocaust, Young surveyed a range of memorial solutions in Europe and the U.S. from traditional heroic figurative monuments to avant-garde installations that deliberately undermined the very premise that monuments are permanent.   Throughout the book Young argued that monument building is a living process, in some sense always unfinished; no matter how much a monument may pretend to be eternal and unchanging, its meaning always evolves as its viewers bring new concerns and understandings to it.    Since the Holocaust was so clearly an event to be pondered rather than celebrated, monuments could never hope to fix its meaning for all time.

            The phenomenal power and popularity of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial almost immediately revived scholarly interest in the subject of public monuments.   Traditionally, public monuments had been the most prestigious forms of commemoration because they were designed as permanent showcases of public memory, to last for the ages.   But in the twentieth century, scholars came to consider the public monument a dead form.   Lewis Mumford wrote in The Culture of Cities (1938) that “the notion of a modern monument is a veritable contradiction in terms.”   While public monuments did continue to be erected in the mid-20 th century, scholars paid little attention until Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial offered a new, distinctly contemporary memorial format, an open solution – to follow James Young’s suggestion – that deliberately encouraged multiple meanings and uses. This spawned an immense literature on the monument itself and a renewed interest in how monuments and other public practices of commemoration work in modern society.

            Fittingly, one of the most frequently cited books on American public memory, John Bodnar’s Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992), began with a discussion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.   Bodnar, an eminent social historian of ethnic and immigrant communities, was dissatisfied with the all too frequent assumption that commemorations were top-down affairs imposed by ruling elites on a passive populace.   The success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial demonstrated to him that commemoration interwove what he called “official” and “vernacular” memory, official memory driven by the need of the state to mythologize itself and maintain the loyalty of its citizens and vernacular memory driven by the need of ordinary people to pursue their social and political concerns in their local communities.   Surveying a broad range of local commemorations including monuments and anniversaries, Bodnar argued that national patriotism worked to “mediate” or reconcile the competing interests of official and vernacular memories.   While Bodnar’s distinction between official and vernacular can break down in practice, his book has helped establish that commemoration “involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments.”

            An interesting example that complicates Bodnar’s framework is Melissa Dabakis’s book, Monuments Of Manliness : Visualizing Labor In American Sculpture, 1880-1935 (1998), which studied various intersections of class, gender, and politics in the generally elite form of monumental sculpture.   Her investigation of the competing monuments to the Haymarket protest in Chicago in 1886 – one to the police, one to the anarchists – demonstrated that the “struggle for supremacy” was not only a conflict over which version of events would become officially enshrined in public space but also a shifting political conflict between left-wing and right-wing groups.   Ironically the official police monument had a more “realistic” vernacular form and definite vernacular appeal, at least among police recruits, while the anarchist monument had a more elite form laden with art-historical associations.

            Art historians like Dabakis, trained to study both the patronage and the reception of works of art, have realized for decades that monumental works become especially contested arenas, precisely because the work has a high public profile.   One of the earliest and best studies of U.S. monuments was Michele Bogart’s Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (1989).   Bogart’s book centered on the golden age of the public monument, a time when sculptural monuments proliferated not only in New York but throughout cities across the continent.    Her book traced the rise of an unabashedly elite genre of edifying commemoration at the end of the nineteenth century, supplied by well-known artists and their powerful political patrons.   But the story concluded with a fascinating account of how this elite consensus unraveled in the early twentieth century, as various groups – such as newly enfranchised women – began to acquire a voice in the process and to challenge the dominant sculptural language.   Since then that story has been extended by scholars such as Andrew Shanken, whose 2002 essay in Art Bulletin focused on the mid-twentieth century movement to replace sculptural monuments with “living memorials” (utilitarian memorials such as highways, parks, and concert halls).    Throughout the twentieth century memorials increasingly transformed from mere sculptural objects into more complex spaces, often with museum or archival functions.   Benjamin Hufbauer’s book Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (2005) has shown how gargantuan Presidential libraries have become a dominant type, overshadowing or even supplanting the older hero-on-a-pedestal that had once been the preferred type of monument to a great leader.

              As noted above, however, traditional public monuments never disappeared, and they continued to be a powerful form of commemoration even as they lost their appeal to cultural elites.   Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall’s Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (1991) is a study of one such monument, the Marine Corps War Memorial erected in Arlington, Virginia in 1954.   Their book embedded the monument within popular culture, where the iconic image originally came from (a wartime newspaper photo) and where it continues to live and thrive.   The phenomenon in which particular monuments have become icons of the nation has been studied in books such as Marvin Trachtenberg’s Statue of Liberty (1976), Rex Alan Smith’s Carving of Mount Rushmore (1985), Christopher A. Thomas’s The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (2002), and most recently Nicolaus Mills’s Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial (2004).   Albert Boime in The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (1998) demonstrated the authoritarian and exclusionary character of many of these icons, although he did not fully take into account what Bodnar might call the vernacular attachment to iconic forms of commemorative art.

            Washington, D.C. has received a great deal of attention because it is the commemorative heart of the nation.   The role of the Capitol building in commemorating the western expansion of the nation, and the defeat of Indians who stood in the way, has been examined in Vivien Fryd, Art And Empire : The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815-1860 (1992).   Other aspects of the Capitol’s commemorative program have been explored in American Pantheon : Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol , a collection of essays edited By Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma (2004).   The development of the “monumental core” of the capital city has been much studied, but the single best volume on the national Mall as a commemorative landscape remains The Mall in Washington, 1791-1991 , edited by Richard Longstreth (1991).    Countless specialized studies on commemorative practices in the capital have been produced – on parades, ceremonies, cemeteries, city plans, outdoor sculpture – but surprisingly few serious synthetic studies of how the city has worked as a commemorative landscape.  

            More scholarly work in this direction is likely as the collective memory field continues to expand beyond its traditional base in sociology, history, and art history and embraces the work of geographers, landscape historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, and other academic practitioners. Richard Handler and Eric Gable’s enthnographic study of America’s most famous living museum, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997), is an excellent example, investigating how the historical lessons of this site are continuously reshaped or even ignored as they are put into practice by reenactors and consumed by tourists.    Much of the newer work is in essay form.   Geographer Derek Alderman, for example, has investigated the issue of commemorative street naming focusing on Martin Luther King, Jr., in a series of articles in professional geography journals.   Some recent work has been collected in anthologies, such as Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape (2001), edited by archaeologist Paul A. Shackel; Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (2002), edited by Jacob J. Climo and Maria G. Cattell; and Places of Commemoration : Search for Identity and Landscape Design (2001), edited by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn.   What all this work tends to have in common is an effort to map individual commemorative sites within larger contexts of remembrance – landscapes, geographic and administrative units, and social networks created by tourism, professions, and other factors.

            This should remind us that commemoration entails not only building, naming, or shaping physical sites.   Commemoration as a practice also involves ritual acts in and occupations of public space as well as other kinds of performance and consumption that may leave no lasting trace on the landscape.   W. Lloyd Warner’s classic study The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959) was an early examination of the role of patriotic parades and other symbolic observances in civic life.   David Glassberg’s American Historical Pageantry : The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990) examined the craze for commemorative pageants in the beginning of the past century, but this phenomenon has a long history in the U.S.   David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes : The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997) and Sarah J. Purcell’s Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (2002) both showed that in the early national period, festivals and anniversaries helped overcome partisan and class divisions and cement a national identity.   In our own time, new electronic media have greatly expanded and altered the terrain of commemoration.   Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997) has made a pioneering contribution in this area; her study examined commemoration across many different media, by charting the ways in which memories of the victims of national crises circulated throughout American culture in films, monuments, medical practices, and domestic grieving turned public.   Yet George Lipsitz’s Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990) has argued that even in age dominated by television and commercial culture, popular traditions of storytelling and festivity among disenfranchised groups, such as working-class blacks in New Orleans, have still played a part in upholding their own versions of the past.

            All these diverse commemorative practices come together most powerfully around the remembrance of war.   It is no surprise that much of the literature on commemoration in the U.S. deals with war and its aftermath.   G. Kurt Piehler’s Remembering War the American Way (1995) has remained a useful synthetic study, but the literature has grown to the point where synthesis now seems quixotic.   The memory of the Civil War has stood out as a particularly fertile topic.   In recent years a great deal of work has been done on memory and race, as scholars from numerous angles have shown how the commemoration of the Civil War helped to shape new racial relations within American society – removing African American soldiers from mainstream public memory, defeating the dream of racial equality, and advancing the cause of white supremacy.   David W. Blight’s ambitious synthesis Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) has become the indispensable reference for this argument.   The book surveys an enormous range of commemorative practices from oratory to pageantry to monuments and beyond.   More specialized studies of the racial relations of war memory include Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Paul A. Shackel, Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape (2003), and Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom : Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (2003).   Recent studies have made ever more nuanced analyses that interweave the issue of race with gender, class, and region.   Exemplary collections along these lines include Where These Memories Grow : History, Memory, and Southern Identity (2000), edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and Monuments to the Lost Cause : Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (2003), edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson.

        In addition to reshaping racial relations and beliefs, the scale of the Civil War dramatically changed and expanded commemorative practices, creating a new cult of the veteran and new modes and technologies of remembering the war dead – innovations that preceded comparable developments in Europe by years or even decades.   For the first time, photographers shot images of battlefield corpses, a profound shift in the understanding and memorialization of warfare analyzed in studies such as Timothy Sweet, Traces of War : Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (1990) and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs : Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989).   The emergence of veterans organizations and their role in promoting the memory of the common soldier have been explored in Stuart McConnell’s Glorious Contentment : the Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (1992) and in Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary’s To Die For : The Paradox of American Patriotism (1999).    Kirk Savage in Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves has examined the resulting democratization of war memorials, and the phenomenal spread of a new type of ordinary-soldier monument.   Another innovation, the creation of national soldier cemeteries such as Gettysburg, was briefly examined as a precedent for twentieth-century European practices by historian George Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (1990).   Since then this line of research has been extended by others such as Susan-Mary Grant in a series of essays, most recently in the journal Nations and Nationalism (2005).

            Battlefields too have been witness to dramatically changing patterns of commemoration, and thus have posed intricate problems for their stewards, most notably the National Park Service.   Edward T. Linenthal in Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (1991) examined the ways in which battlefields from the Revolution to WWII have been transformed into “sacred” landscapes which various groups fight to protect from political or racial or commercial defilement.   Any commemorative narratives that stray from the narrowly defined script of military heroism become suspect.   For instance the National Park Service’s efforts to expand the historical significance of Civil War battlefields beyond military history into social and political issues such as slavery have encountered resistance both inside and outside the agency, as Paul Shackel has shown in his case study of Manassas ( Memory in Black and White ).   More recently Jim Weeks in Gettysburg : Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (2003) has called into question the notion of the sacred by arguing that tourism and the marketplace have profoundly shaped even the most revered battlefield from its very inception.   He has shown that, as cultural norms have changed, the standards of appropriate commemorative behaviors have also changed – sometimes in surprising ways.   For example, battle reenactments originated as commercial entertainments that elites discouraged as frivolous, but in the past two decades have grown into a wildly popular participatory sport, with ever more stringent standards of authenticity.   Ironically, the hundreds of regimental and officer monuments that were once the heart of the commemorative landscape have now become intrusions into the “authentic” experience of the past!

            Besides battlefield reenactments, another major new participatory phenomenon of memorialization is the spontaneous offering of personal mementos at national memorials, which began in the early 1980s at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.   Kristin Ann Hass has examined the roots and meanings of this phenomenon in Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1998).   At the same time recovery efforts and reverence for the bodies of the war dead have reached new extremes of emotional and financial cost, as Thomas M. Hawley has recently investigated in The Remains of War : Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (2005).   All of these developments indicate an extension and transformation of the popular sphere of memory practices of the late nineteenth century.   Ordinary citizens increasingly have become the subject and the actor in commemorative initiatives, even as the power and cost of the “military-industrial complex” have grown mightily.

            In recent times the remembrance of war has become connected almost inextricably with the issue of trauma.   Once again the Holocaust and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial have served as the key landmarks in this process.   Young’s Texture of Memory and Sturken’s Tangled Memories have shed light on the new importance of victimization within commemorative practices.   Geographer Kenneth E. Foote’s study Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (1997) examined how Americans have dealt with landscapes marked by war, mass murder, and other traumatic events.   In a related development, the remembering and forgetting of Indian removal, confinement, and extermination have become increasingly important subjects in studies of national historic sites such as Dispossessing the Wilderness : Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (1999) by Mark David Spence,   and The Politics of Hallowed Ground : Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (1999) by Mario Gonzalez and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.   Edward Linenthal has created the most extensive body of work on trauma and commemoration, in a series of meticulously researched books on subjects spanning from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first: Sacred Ground , Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (1995), and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (2001).   Since 9-11, the subject has become even more important, and numerous scholars have already entered the field.   Two new examples include Savage’s study of the “therapeutic memorial” in an essay in the collection Terror, Culture, Politics:   Rethinking 9/11 , edited by Daniel Sherman and Terry Nardin (2006), and Terry Smith’s examination of the contemporary struggle over iconic architecture in Architecture of Aftermath (2006).

            While work on commemoration continues to multiply, and to examine ever more carefully how memory practices penetrate all facets of our collective life, much work remains to be done on the actual impact of all these practices.   Few scholars have attempted to theorize the relationship between commemoration and tradition, what we might call the exterior and interior faces of historical consciousness.   On the one hand are public sites and rituals of memory, and on the other hand are ingrained habits of thought and action that persist in individuals, families, and communities across long spans of time.     While few scholars would agree with Nora that interior memory has disappeared, most scholars have focused on the exterior struggles to construct memory in one form rather than another.   One of the only scholars to argue against this trend has been social scientist Barry Schwartz, who has written a series of articles and books on American Presidents in historical memory.   In Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (2000) Schwartz has argued that memory is not constructed anew in each new commemorative project; instead, he has asserted that in a democratic society historical facts have serious weight and help create “core elements” of memory that persist over long periods of time.   Yet his belief in an authentic “core” memory led him, ironically, to downplay certain historical facts, such as the outright fraud and hucksterism involved in “assembling” the log cabin in which Lincoln was supposedly born.   (For more on the log cabin story, see Dwight Pitcaithley’s meticulously researched essay in Shackel’s Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape .)   In fact, historical errors and deliberate distortions abound in the landscape of commemoration, as James W. Loewen’s amazing study, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999), has so amply demonstrated.   But Schwartz’s point remains well taken: scholars must take into account not only the changing politics of commemoration but also the stubborn persistence of traditions and beliefs – some of which persist even when they conflict with historical fact or common sense.  

            This perspective might have helped scholars prepare better for the emotionally charged controversy over the Smithsonian’s ill-fated Enola Gay exhibit, which was intended to mark the 50 th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima by putting the event in historical context.   The controversy was a particularly dramatic example of how the work of historians, based on supposedly apolitical principles of evidence and analysis, came into conflict with powerful “memory constituencies,” whose long-cherished beliefs about the righteousness of the American military cemented their group identities as veterans and patriots.    Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Englehardt’s History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (1998) untangled this controversy and showed how the partisan politics and “culture wars” of the time helped fuel it.   At the same time the book showed how the Enola Gay fiasco was not simply another episode in the “politics of commemoration.”   The controversy transcended the politics of the moment and became a classic confrontation between history and collective memory – anticipated in Halbwachs’ original distinction – where history inevitably loses precisely because it lacks the unshakeable beliefs of psychically invested constituencies.   Some of the contributors to History Wars asked whether the “patriotic” narratives of commemoration could be expanded and humanized to encompass the multiple realities of war, to bring the longstanding traditional stories of triumph into contact with more tragic stories of the human cost and moral ambiguity of warfare.   The question has no easy answer.

            One pioneering effort to integrate the various realms of internal and external memory, of invisible traditions and visible histories, is Martha Norkunas’s Monuments and Memory: History and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts (2002).   Her book traced the changing relationship between the public, mostly masculine face of memory in Lowell – in honorific monuments and historical sites – and the largely oral traditions, passed on by women, that preserved the memory of those who kept the community intact and functioning outside the public eye.   While her study would benefit from more analysis of the interaction between these realms of memory, her book points in a useful direction.   Likewise, Bodnar’s distinction between vernacular and official memory remains intuitively useful, but needs further refinement, retesting, and revision in order to understand better how these realms of memory interpenetrate one another.   This might help explain, for example, the persistence and power of military commemoration.   How does the inner/vernacular memory of women, ethnic groups, and other ordinary Americans help support the outer/ official   memory of such a quintessentially top-down, masculine institution as the military? Pursuing questions like these would eventually help bridge the gap between the spectacular “politics of commemoration” and the more inconspicuous workings of tradition.   How the past is produced, consumed, internalized, and acted upon will no doubt remain a rich and complex problem for scholars as they work further to extend and integrate the approaches outlined in this essay.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The importance of historical memory. Examples of past events reveal that undemocratic governance might become a painful experience.

"While understanding the construct of social memory we will be able to find the solutions for the current challenges on our way of the democratization and moreover, transform them into opportunities. Only by understanding our past, we are better able to understand our future."

Related Papers

The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics

P.J. Brendese

Oksana Kalishchuk

Because of the strong mobilizing force that collective memory has, memory has become a major instrument of political power. In totalitarian regimes, collective memory is manipulated when the need arises to rewrite the past to meet present goals. In democratic states as well, as the example of postwar France shows us, collective memory can be subject to willed amnesia for the sake of present and future political objectives. Moreover, because of the powerful sociopolitical function it serves, collective memory often becomes an area of contest between groups in conflict. Since the memory boom of the 1970's in Europe, collective memory has gained its place as a strong mobilizing force in society. Furthermore, the importance given to collective memory across the different disciplines of human and social sciences since demonstrates to what extent memory has been institutionalized. Collective memory is sustained and kept alive through formal and informal efforts by both the group and the individual. If it was history that traditionally provided us with knowledge of our past, today it is what Pierre Nora calls the "memory model" that has triumphed. While history is constructed and disseminated by an elite group of specialists - historians -, memory is democratic and belongs to no one. The surge in autobiographical writings that occurred in the decades since the Shoah has placed the individual at the center as a producer of knowledge. Many historians in France and elsewhere have pointed to the Shoah as the main instigator of this renewed importance in collective memory. More importantly, the Shoah has inspired many survivors of different collective atrocities around the world to revisit dominant History and tell their stories. For many, the process through which the Shoah was established as a lieu de mémoire has become a model or a template to follow.

Journal of Democracy

Memory Studies

Katrin Antweiler

The article proposes to pursue Memory Studies as Studies of Governmentality. It aims to demonstrate how an analysis of memory, undertaken from the perspective of governmentality, can provide an important diagnostic of our time(s) and its political conditions, while furthermore illuminating how these are derived from narratives about the past. For this, I put into dialogue theoretical considerations of the Foucauldian concept with findings from a study of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. With a special focus on public memories that are performed and produced at the juncture of Holocaust memory and advocacy for human rights, this article puts forward an innovative approach to public memory's entanglements with contemporary politics and subsequently argues that any public memory can in the broader context of governmental rationalities be understood as a technique of government itself.

Memory Studies 2008

Claudia Wasserman

It is about the memory of the authoritarian legacy on the public sphere in Latina America in the XXI century as a fundamental issue to consolidate the democratic process in South American countries.

Armen Marsoobian

This essay is a meditation on memory and democracy. I will argue that democracy as a way of life is conditioned upon how well a community remembers its past. The concept of democracy as a way of life, as distinct from a particular form of governance, has its origins in the political philosophy of John Dewey. I will approach this issue in a somewhat roundabout manner. In the first part, I will examine a series of Dewey’s writings from the early 1920s that resulted from his visit of the newly established Republic of Turkey. I contend that the se­rious shortcomings in Dewey’s analysis of Turkish state nation-building highlight deficiencies in his otherwise laudable and nuanced democratic theory. In the second part, I provide a more sustained analysis of the role of collective memory within a community, especially one that aspires to a democratic way of life. I will then conclude with a few reflections upon issues arising from Turkish collective memory as it relates to the Armenian Geno...

RCCS Annual Review

Myrian Santos

Doris Kearns Goodwin and husband Dick Goodwin lived, observed, created and chronicled the 1960s

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Book Review

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

By Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon & Schuster: 480 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

“An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s” isn’t precisely the book that presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin set out to write.

Dominating this often fascinating volume is both the colossal presence and the sudden absence of Richard “Dick” Goodwin, Doris’ late husband, whose speechwriting talents defined some of the most memorable moments of the 1960s. The couple’s aim was to co-write a book based on his extraordinary archive — 300 boxes! — of personal papers and curios, from voluminous speech drafts to a shattered police club from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Husband and wife spent years perusing and discussing those treasures, an effort short-circuited by his death in 2018, at 86, of cancer. Amid her grief and a move from their rambling home in Concord, Mass., to a Boston condo, Goodwin took up the project on her own.

She describes the result as a hybrid of history, biography and memoir. At its most poignant, “An Unfinished Love Story” is, as the title indicates, an account of personal loss. It also turns out to be a reflection on the process of constructing history, suggesting how time, perspective and stories left unwritten can shape our view of the past.

Reckoning with long shadow of 1960s counterculture

Max Ludington’s ‘Thorn Tree’ suggests the divisions of the 1960s await a moment to reemerge. But strong writing is weighed down by tonal and structural problems.

April 13, 2024

Goodwin, the author of award-winning biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and others, has a nice touch as a storyteller. Here she successfully navigates the awkward feat of weaving together the couple’s gently probing conversations, her husband’s archival documentation, other historical sources and her own reporting.

“An Unfinished Love Story” offers a bird’s-eye view of familiar events, and of a decade marked by both idealism and political violence. “Too often,” Goodwin writes, with her characteristic optimism, “memories of assassination, violence, and social turmoil have obscured the greatest illumination of the Sixties, the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America.”

While arguing for this rosier perspective, the book provides nuance and detail on matters such as the origins of the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, Robert F. Kennedy’s private agonies over whether to challenge LBJ for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, and Jackie Kennedy’s emotional struggles after her husband’s 1963 assassination. In a 1966 letter from Hawaii, Jackie addresses Dick Goodwin, her close friend, as a fellow “lost soul” and complains of “memories that drag you down into a life that can never be the same.” That is a sentiment that Doris Kearns Goodwin understands.

The canonized and vilified Capt. James Cook is ready for a reassessment

In Hampton Sides’ telling, this explorer’s final mission, ending with his death on the shores of Hawaii’s Big Island, has room for both condemnation and celebration.

April 2, 2024

She and the then-married Goodwin — with his “curly, disheveled black hair,” “thick, unruly eyebrows” and “pockmarked face” — met at Harvard in 1972, where she taught a popular course on the American presidency. He had left the Johnson administration in 1965, three years before she joined it, and had become disillusioned with the Vietnam War. Despite having penned her own antiwar piece for the New Republic, she would become an LBJ confidante, an aide on his presidential memoirs and a lifelong admirer.

Not just a speechwriter but a policy advisor and political strategist, Dick Goodwin enjoyed a Zelig-like march through 20th century American history. President of the Harvard Law Review and law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Goodwin worked for two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Johnson, and several would-be presidents, including Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. He later wrote the concession speech that Al Gore delivered after the Supreme Court stopped the recount of the 2000 presidential election vote in Florida.

According to his widow, Goodwin idolized the coolly self-possessed JFK, fused with LBJ, regarded McCarthy as “the most original mind” he’d encountered in politics and adored RFK, his best friend of the bunch. (No mention is made here of the seamier side of these politicians’ lives, or how their sexual indiscretions bear on their legacies.)

Nearly every Democratic leader seems to have sought the services of the brilliant, cigar-smoking, workaholic Goodwin. But, as “An Unfinished Love Story” makes clear, he was more than a pen for hire. Goodwin had passionately held views about civil rights, the alleviation of poverty and other issues. As Johnson’s principal speechwriter, he helped fashion both the title and the programs of the Great Society. He was responsible for LBJ’s single most powerful speech, on behalf of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which coopted the anthem of the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.”

How Keith Haring’s art transcended critics, bigotry and a merciless virus

Biographer Brad Gooch’s “Radiant” reveals how much life and creativity artist Keith Haring packed into 31 years before he died of AIDS.

March 15, 2024

Goodwin left the Johnson administration, against the president’s wishes, to pursue a solo writing career. Over time, his public stance against American involvement in Vietnam pitted him against his former boss. “It’s like being bitten by your own dog,” Johnson said of Goodwin’s defection.

Goodwin was, at heart, deeply loyal, his widow suggests, even if he sometimes chose loyalty to principles over personal attachments. On the other hand, when a previously hesitant Bobby Kennedy entered the 1968 Democratic primary race against McCarthy, friendship prevailed, and Goodwin switched sides, as he had earlier warned McCarthy he would. The RFK assassination, following victory in the California Democratic primary (and Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder earlier that year), was shattering for Goodwin, as for so many others.

“An Unfinished Love Story” is at its most moving when it touches on the Goodwins’ long, happy, occasionally contentious marriage; its bumpy origins (after becoming a widower, he wasn’t as ready to commit as she was); and his emotional farewell. Always attuned to relationships, Goodwin is an astute chronicler of her own.

Beyond underlining the brighter side of the 1960s, the archive and the conversations it prompted changed the couple’s views of the two presidents they served. She gained a deeper appreciation of the impact of Kennedy’s idealism, she writes, while her husband moderated his long-standing bitterness toward Johnson. Embedded in that rapprochement is an unstated hope: that more knowledge and informed debate might somehow ease our country’s current political polarization as well.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.

More to Read

How people of color carry the burden of untold stories

April 3, 2024

Column: For years, the Reagans’ daughter regretted some things she wrote. Now she’s at peace

Feb. 6, 2024

Letters to the Editor: Congratulations to George Skelton on 50 years covering California’s good, bad and in-between

Jan. 21, 2024

A cure for the common opinion

Get thought-provoking perspectives with our weekly newsletter.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Calmes: That scowl. The gag order. Frightened jurors. Who’s on trial, a former president or a mob boss?

April 28, 2024

Abcarian: How Santa Monica’s Rape Treatment Center revolutionized the way we treat victims of sexual assault

Opinion: My mother set herself on fire. Why do people choose to self-immolate?

Op-Comic: How crying is actually good for you

April 27, 2024

Translated fiction: Memory, history and the question of ‘sampling’ from other novels

Reviews of books by selva almada, yambo ouologuem, tanja maljartschuk, balla, fine gråbøl and rodrigo blanco calderón.

Not a River by Selva Almada is on the 2024 International Booker shortlist

All novels can be said to be in conversation with other novels. But while influences on the form and viewpoint of a novel are easily acknowledged, there are particular novels that more directly speak through borrowings. Notions of postmodernist intertextuality allow for all of this and in the novels of Kathy Acker, for example, unacknowledged quotations are seen as radical rather than robbery.

In 1968, when Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem, translated from the French by Ralph Manheim (Penguin, 220pp, £9.99), was published in France, there was less tolerance of such appropriation. Born in Mali, Ouologeum was teaching in Paris by the time he began to write the novel. The initial reception for Le devoir de violence was so positive that he was awarded the Prix Renaudot.

Yambo Ouologuem in 1968, when he won the Prix Renaudot prize for his novel Le devoir de violence. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

After Manheim’s translation of the novel was published it was noticed that three pages of the novel were recognisably close to a section of Graham Greene’s It’s A Battlefield. Further close examination of the text revealed borrowings from a large number of sources, ranging from the Bible to Guy de Maupassant and André Schwarz-Bart (who, unlike Greene, was pleased to be used in the book). But these examples of “sampling” as it might be called, do not detract or distract from a novel that is unrelenting in its determination to locate the origins of what Chérif Keïta in his introduction calls “the spectre of politicians and their clans morphing into bloodsucking and kleptocratic dynasties”.

So, while colonialism exacerbated the brutalisation and suffering of ordinary people, the origins of slavery and poverty are seen to have existed long before the arrival of Europeans. Ouologuem’s method was to critique dynastic eras and countenance the effect on the population as a whole before particularising the suffering through the lives of a few individuals. This allows him to be withering about a German anthropologist’s romanticisation of the continent or to detail the adversities and transformations in the life of one of the few truly sympathetic characters in the novel, Raymond Kassoum, who among other unexpected developments, has an 18-month affair with a man he meets when he is impoverished in Paris.

Caoilinn Hughes: ‘I suppose it’s in our DNA, that instinct to leave and to move’

Local history: a Wicklow tea room, ambitious Kennedys, New Quay secrets and Cork curiosities

The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain; Ireland 1970-2020; Car Bombs and Barrack Busters

Novels continue to converse with novels: the Prix Goncourt-winning book The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr fictionalises a case similar to that of Ouologuem, a unique writer whose mixed fortunes should encourage, rather than deter, new readers for his complex and engrossing analysis of affliction and violence.

Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk is translated from the Ukranian by Zenia Tompkins

Another approach to history and memory is adopted in Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukranian by Zenia Tompkins (Bullaun Press, 272pp, €16), in which the narrator’s panic attacks and possible OCD necessitate a source of absorption outside of herself.

“The end that I was experiencing, the end of all times within me, couldn’t be described the way I used to, the way I expected to. New words were needed, a new truth, and the search for them grabbed hold of my entire mind.” The subject of this need is Viacheslav Lypynski, a Ukrainian nationalist whose Polish origins lend extra fervour to his convictions.

Through a deep engagement with the political and familial life of this late 19th century figure, the narrator can displace the immediate discomfort and disappointments of her own life, though we still learn about her unsatisfactory relationships and increasing isolation. Lypynski too had an unsatisfactory emotional life and serious ill-health led to his early death, aged 49.

[  International Booker Prize 2024 longlist announced: 13 translated novels feature  ]

By arguing for a conservative Ukraine whose population would be loyal to a royal figurehead he became increasingly at odds with his time and his one-time supporters. Some pronouncements have extra relevance now (although the novel was originally published before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and discussions about what nationalism means are of interest more generally.

But this perceptive novel is often at its finest in considerations of time and beguiling observations of the countryside: “The usual fogs scattered to the solemn bellowing of the livestock, driven out to graze for the first time after long months of wintering.”

Many of the characters in Among the Ruins by Balla are permanently drunk

The melancholy that permeates Forgottenness is also fundamental to Among the Ruins by Balla, translated from the Slovak by David Short (Jantar, 228pp, £12.99), but while Maljartschuk’s writing might be described as sober, the characters in this novel are permanently drunk. Chief among them is the psychiatrist Dr Felešlegi (whose surname could be translated as “waste of space”, as David Short tells us), a practitioner of little assistance to his confounded patients and who still depends on his mother for “a petty-bourgeois Sunday lunch”.

A woman called Vargová – like the author, known only by her surname – writes ever more desperate letters to Felešlegi, mixing nostalgia for the communist years of Czechoslovakia with details of the shocking abuse inflicted on her by men. Her opinions are as coruscating as they are derogatory and are usually directed at minorities. The structure of the novel is fragmentary, with short chapters thematically linked rather than giving any sense of development. But while the characters are reprehensible and the direction of the novel becomes ever grimmer, the narrative retains a sardonic humour even at times of hopelessness: “In the empty ring, the loser fights on”.

Much of the writing is wistfully beautiful in What Kingdom by Fine Gråbøl

The mental health difficulties of the characters in Balla’s novel are acute and incessant. The same can be said of the narrator of What Kingdom by Fine Gråbøl , translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Archipelago Books, 146pp, $18), who is living in “assigned accommodation” with others who have serious psychiatric disorders.

A series of short chapters convey the delimited space in which she lives as she ascribes human characteristics to the furniture in the room. She is happy at meetings because “there’s a sense of security” but when they end “I’m released back into my incomplete individuality”. Episodes of self-harm are disturbing to read but much of the writing is wistfully beautiful that many of the short chapters – some just a few words – are worth reading more than once.

There is a feeling of authenticity about every word of the novel, whether it be the narrator’s joy in singing with a band or her sombre observation of “people tearing along the bike lanes on their way to work, immediately looking the other way if they happen to set eyes on you, the sad life you’ve obviously got”.

[  Fiction in translation: from a masterpiece of postwar guilt to femicide in Brazil  ]

The chief joy the narrator of What Kingdom experiences is the companionship of others. A similar bond exists between disparate groupings in Not A River by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, 100pp, £11.99), whether it’s between boyhood friends or teenage sisters.

The three boys once went on a fishing trip, which had an unfortunate outcome. Two of those boys return there as men with the son of the friend who can no longer join them. They catch and shoot a large ray for which, it transpires, they have no purpose. A group of local men are unimpressed by this wastefulness. The novel continues with fluid transitions between times and perspectives. Events occur before we learn the context for their outcome. A recurring and predictive nightmare is visited as is a healer who might help the dreamer. The girls explore the limits of their enrapturing power.

All the strands act like tributaries connecting in the river, flowing together smoothly until they don’t. Then, it is not a river. This allusive novel deserves its place on the 2024 International Booker shortlist.

Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón was longlisted for the International Booker 2024

Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated from the Spanish by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn (Seven Stories Press UK, 238pp, £12.99), was included on the longlist for the same prize. The chief merit of this artful novel is the unalloyed enjoyment of a scenario that develops and diverts in unforeseen ways. Indeed, there is often an improvisatory feel to the novel, which centres on a man called Ulises Kan whose father-in-law – a general in the Venezuelan army – arranges for him, rather than Ulises’ estranged wife Paulina, to inherit an apartment, if he will help to establish a dog rescue centre within four months of the general’s death.

This need has arisen because many of those leaving the country after the election of Hugo Chávez as president have left their dogs behind. Although the political instability of the country is not directly addressed in the book, sudden changes within the plot reflect the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty as do the blurred motivations of duplicitous characters once thought to be unwavering.

Calderón’s writing style has a casual, free-to-roam quality. He is happy to point out the absurdity of outcomes as much as their gravity when, as often is the case, it becomes apparent that only the ill-treated dogs are truly virtuous.

Declan O'Driscoll

Declan O'Driscoll is a contributor to The Irish Times

IN THIS SECTION

An expert’s secret rules of drinking in an irish bar, british side postpones james cleverly meeting with helen mcentee amid rising tensions over migration, young man dies after quadbike collides with tractor, surrendered passport and €50,000 bail seem no hindrance to flight as top cocaine suspect vanishes, quiet quitting: you always had workers who did 9-5 but it’s a creeping malaise, employers say, ‘i could rent an apartment, but why’ the teenager who lives on germany’s high-speed trains, latest stories, your top stories on monday: housing ‘the top issue with voters’; the fluent irish speaker who can’t find a place in a second-level gaelscoil, three men set to go on trial for murder of journalist lyra mckee, media freedom ‘perilously close to breaking point’ in several eu countries, stop referring to eu as a ‘bloc’ – this is divisive linguistic rot imported from britain, a bride’s fashion decisions are no longer focused on just one day.

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Information
• Cookie Settings
• Community Standards

• Washington State University
• Go to wsu twitter
• Go to wsu facebook
• Go to wsu linkedin

Exploring racial segregation, historical memory of Seattle

Author Megan Asaka asks her readers to think about who is retained in the historical memory surrounding the settlement and growth of the city and what is at stake when other groups are erased from the story. She explores these questions in her book Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City and in an upcoming presentation at Washington State University at 4:30 p.m. April 4 in Todd 276 on the Pullman campus.

Asaka, associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, will give a a talk entitled “The Dividing Line: Race and Segregation in Early Seattle” which will examine the creation of a geographical line in the city, dividing north and south, and white and non-white .

This segregation began at the inception of white settlement when founders pushed the Duwamish peoples to the southern part of the city and maintained a “residence district” in the northern part for white families. The efforts of local authorities in the city to contain its multiracial population shaped a geography of inequality that persists, as is evident in the social and spatial dynamics in Seattle today.

Asaka’s connection to Seattle is personal, as her family roots there go back four generations. Part of the Japanese American community, she was acutely aware of the region’s history of Japanese incarceration during World War II.

“I was always curious about the disconnect between what I knew from my family history in the city — which included segregation, exclusion, incarceration — and the city’s image as being a progressive, openminded place, both past and present,” she said.

Her book, which seeks to reconcile these apparent incongruities “reconceptualizes Seattle history from the perspective of those who had been pushed to the margins of urban society.”

She said that although her book is centrally focused on a local space, its relevance should transcend Seattle.

She noted that in many places “there has been a very particular way in which history has been told, focusing on the businessmen, the so-called pioneers, the early political leaders. We know their names and identities, we learn them in school and in our textbooks. But these perspectives only illuminate one view of [a] city’s past. Equally important are the stories of laborers, immigrants, and others…whose historical presence and contributions are rarely acknowledged.” The talk is put on by the WSU History Department’s Roots of Contemporary Issues Event Series .

College of Arts and Sciences recognizes outstanding faculty, staff, and students

Recent news.

Reusable containers a hit with students and the environment

WSU selects T. Chris Riley-Tillman as next provost

Phyllis J. Campbell endows deanship at WSU’s Carson College of Business

Exhibit explores queer experience on the Palouse

Spanish, bilingual course from WSU Extension creates climate ambassadors

VR can motivate people to donate to refugee crises regardless of politics

Oral History Offers a Model for How Schools Can Introduce Students to Complex Topics

• Share article

As historian David McCullough said, history is the study of who we are and why we are the way we are.

That’s why teachers in the Memphis-Shelby County public schools, as racially isolated now as they were when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, have launched a curriculum to introduce their students to the 13 children who helped integrate these Tennessee city schools in 1961.

Memphis-Shelby County teachers, researchers from the University of Memphis, and the local Memphis 13 Foundation worked with seven of the 10 surviving members of the Memphis 13—a group of Black 1st graders who peacefully enrolled in four all-white schools at the height of the civil rights era—to develop teacher training, lesson plans, and oral history activities for elementary students.

“Just going home and talking to grandparents or talking to the elders in their community was never going to be enough,” said Anna Falkner, an assistant professor at the University of Memphis and a co-developer of the curriculum, “because it wouldn’t provide [students] with the context that they needed in order to understand what happened and understand the ongoing effects of, for example, the way segregation looks today.”

The Memphis 13 project offers a model for how schools can introduce complex subjects to students, even in early grades, while also giving them opportunities to investigate social studies in their communities

“Really consider the context,” Falkner said. “What are the specifics that can help students understand their Southern context or the context wherever they are and what that means in relation to the larger experience. It’s not just focusing on that national narrative, not just sharing Brown v. Board , but really thinking about, what did this look like in my backyard? What did it look like for my family members or my community members?”

For example, teachers met with surviving members of the Memphis 13 to identify projects for students in 2nd and 5th grades, when Tennessee social studies standards cover civil rights issues. Sheila Malone, one of the students who first integrated into the district’s Bruce Elementary as a 1st grader, suggested that 5th graders record the experiences of others who had attended the district schools during desegregation.

“[Malone] wanted the students to go back home and share the story and have intergenerational conversations about the history of our schools,” said Gina Tillis, the director of curriculum and instruction for the Memphis 13 Foundation, who co-developed the Memphis curriculum. “One of the things that I’ve noticed with the members of Memphis 13 is, as they’re sharing their stories, they’re unpacking memories that have been silenced. … This is a really powerful space for students to reflect on their education, their parents’ and their elders’ education, and what we’re doing collectively to create a more inclusive and equitable school system.”

Second graders, for example, watch documentaries and review news accounts about the school desegregation decisions in Memphis and other cities, identifying ways children their age participated. In 5th grade , students review collected oral history interviews and collect their own, as well as analyze modern policies related to school integration. Tillis said the project plans to expand the curriculum to 8th and 11th grades in the future.

Building school integration history projects

Emerging technology has made it easier for educators to engage their students in active historical research, according to the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University in Ohio. The center, for example, has developed apps to help students record interviews and archive historical documents.

Efforts like those of the Memphis 13 helped integrate public schools in the decades following the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education . However, these trends began to reverse in the 1990s and have worsened to this day, even as the overall public school population has grown more diverse. Studies find schools serving high populations of students of color continue to have on average fewer educational opportunities —including challenging courses, experienced teachers, and other resources—compared with schools serving mostly white students.

While the Memphis 13 are well known, Tillis stressed that schools can use community history to engage students regardless of where they are. “Everyone has a school desegregation story. Every district, every person ... and every district story is unique,” she said. “It’s, I think, one of the most powerful stories to share because it offers you this platform to really deconstruct what’s going on in our schools.”

Researchers recommended that schools interested in developing similar projects:

• Work with local historians and groups to identify social studies topics and events that had strong effects on the local community. This can include school district librarians or archivists, for example.
• Provide teachers with training in both the historical context and strategies and tools for documenting community history.
• Focus on topics that encourage students to make connections between history and current issues in their community.

“One of the lessons that we’re hoping to share with other school districts is just the power of listening to your community members who are historians, even if they don’t work for the local archive: the neighbor down the street who kept all the newspapers, the person who knew everybody in the neighborhood,” Falkner said. “Finding those community members and making a meaningful way for them to participate in the curriculum development is the most important piece.”

Sign Up for EdWeek Update

Edweek top school jobs.

Sign Up & Sign In

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.

By Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Mr. Shugerman is a law professor at Boston University.

About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts.

After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the district attorney has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.

To recap: Mr. Trump is accused in the case of falsifying business records. Those are misdemeanor charges. To elevate it to a criminal case, Mr. Bragg and his team have pointed to potential violations of federal election law and state tax fraud. They also cite state election law, but state statutory definitions of “public office” seem to limit those statutes to state and local races.

Both the misdemeanor and felony charges require that the defendant made the false record with “intent to defraud.” A year ago, I wondered how entirely internal business records (the daily ledger, pay stubs and invoices) could be the basis of any fraud if they are not shared with anyone outside the business. I suggested that the real fraud was Mr. Trump’s filing an (allegedly) false report to the Federal Election Commission, and that only federal prosecutors had jurisdiction over that filing.

A recent conversation with Jeffrey Cohen, a friend, Boston College law professor and former prosecutor, made me think that the case could turn out to be more legitimate than I had originally thought. The reason has to do with those allegedly falsified business records: Most of them were entered in early 2017, generally before Mr. Trump filed his Federal Election Commission report that summer. Mr. Trump may have foreseen an investigation into his campaign, leading to its financial records. He may have falsely recorded these internal records before the F.E.C. filing as consciously part of the same fraud: to create a consistent paper trail and to hide intent to violate federal election laws, or defraud the F.E.C.

In short: It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up.

Looking at the case in this way might address concerns about state jurisdiction. In this scenario, Mr. Trump arguably intended to deceive state investigators, too. State investigators could find these inconsistencies and alert federal agencies. Prosecutors could argue that New York State agencies have an interest in detecting conspiracies to defraud federal entities; they might also have a plausible answer to significant questions about whether New York State has jurisdiction or whether this stretch of a state business filing law is pre-empted by federal law.

However, this explanation is a novel interpretation with many significant legal problems. And none of the Manhattan district attorney’s filings or today’s opening statement even hint at this approach.

Instead of a theory of defrauding state regulators, Mr. Bragg has adopted a weak theory of “election interference,” and Justice Juan Merchan described the case , in his summary of it during jury selection, as an allegation of falsifying business records “to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 election.”

As a reality check: It is legal for a candidate to pay for a nondisclosure agreement. Hush money is unseemly, but it is legal. The election law scholar Richard Hasen rightly observed , “Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases.”

In Monday’s opening argument, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo still evaded specifics about what was illegal about influencing an election, but then he claimed , “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” None of the relevant state or federal statutes refer to filing violations as fraud. Calling it “election fraud” is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet.

The most accurate description of this criminal case is a federal campaign finance filing violation. Without a federal violation (which the state election statute is tethered to), Mr. Bragg cannot upgrade the misdemeanor counts into felonies. Moreover, it is unclear how this case would even fulfill the misdemeanor requirement of “intent to defraud” without the federal crime.

In stretching jurisdiction and trying a federal crime in state court, the Manhattan district attorney is now pushing untested legal interpretations and applications. I see three red flags raising concerns about selective prosecution upon appeal.

First, I could find no previous case of any state prosecutor relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act either as a direct crime or a predicate crime. Whether state prosecutors have avoided doing so as a matter of law, norms or lack of expertise, this novel attempt is a sign of overreach.

Second, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the New York statute requires that the predicate (underlying) crime must also be a New York crime, not a crime in another jurisdiction. The district attorney responded with judicial precedents only about other criminal statutes, not the statute in this case. In the end, the prosecutors could not cite a single judicial interpretation of this particular statute supporting their use of the statute (a plea deal and a single jury instruction do not count).

Third, no New York precedent has allowed an interpretation of defrauding the general public. Legal experts have noted that such a broad “election interference” theory is unprecedented, and a conviction based on it may not survive a state appeal.

Mr. Trump’s legal team also undercut itself for its decisions in the past year: His lawyers essentially put all of their eggs in the meritless basket of seeking to move the trial to federal court, instead of seeking a federal injunction to stop the trial entirely. If they had raised the issues of selective or vindictive prosecution and a mix of jurisdictional, pre-emption and constitutional claims, they could have delayed the trial past Election Day, even if they lost at each federal stage.

Another reason a federal crime has wound up in state court is that President Biden’s Justice Department bent over backward not to reopen this valid case or appoint a special counsel. Mr. Trump has tried to blame Mr. Biden for this prosecution as the real “election interference.” The Biden administration’s extra restraint belies this allegation and deserves more credit.

Eight years after the alleged crime itself, it is reasonable to ask if this is more about Manhattan politics than New York law. This case should serve as a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America — and promote bipartisan reforms of our partisan prosecutorial system.

Nevertheless, prosecutors should have some latitude to develop their case during trial, and maybe they will be more careful and precise about the underlying crime, fraud and the jurisdictional questions. Mr. Trump has received sufficient notice of the charges, and he can raise his arguments on appeal. One important principle of “ our Federalism ,” in the Supreme Court’s terms, is abstention , that federal courts should generally allow state trials to proceed first and wait to hear challenges later.

This case is still an embarrassment, in terms of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selectivity. Nevertheless, each side should have its day in court. If convicted, Mr. Trump can fight many other days — and perhaps win — in appellate courts. But if Monday’s opening is a preview of exaggerated allegations, imprecise legal theories and persistently unaddressed problems, the prosecutors might not win a conviction at all.

Jed Handelsman Shugerman (@jedshug) is a law professor at Boston University.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Mike Johnson and the troubled history of recent Republican speakers

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson attends a news conference at the U.S. Capitol earlier this month. Julia Nikhinson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson attends a news conference at the U.S. Capitol earlier this month.

When the House returns from its recess next week, Speaker Mike Johnson is now widely expected to resume his duties without immediately facing a motion to oust him.

Just such a "motion to vacate the chair" was filed against Johnson in March by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. But Greene has yet to make the motion "privileged," which under the rules would necessitate a vote within two days.

Greene had vowed to press her challenge after Johnson announced a strategy to pass $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan earlier this month. About two-thirds of that money was for Ukraine, an issue Greene had called her "red line" for moving against the speaker.

Two colleagues had spoken up to say they would join Greene in such a vote, giving her enough to defeat the speaker if all the chamber's Democrats voted to do the same. That's what the Democrats did when a motion to vacate the chair ousted the last Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, last fall. He had been in the job less than nine months.

But this time around several Democrats have indicated they would cross the aisle to support Johnson and frustrate Greene & Co. if it came to a vote. Democratic leaders have indicated they are open to this, and it essentially repeats the strategy that allowed Johnson to pass the Ukraine portion of the aid bill earlier this month.

3rd Republican joins motion to oust Mike Johnson as House speaker

So Greene may have missed her moment. Johnson has gained stature and won bipartisan praise for letting the whole House vote on the aid package. He also got strong support in the Senate , where even an outright majority of Republicans voted for the aid on Tuesday. The package was signed into law by President Biden the following day.

But as Greene has said, the existence of her motion serves as a warning. She could activate a vote at any time so Johnson should know he is skating on thin ice.

And that is true, he should. Even a glance at the history of Republican speakers since World War II would tell him that.

The current state of internal politics among House Republicans is so unsettled that almost anything could happen at almost any time.

As Shakespeare wrote: "Uneasy rests the head that wears a crown," and in recent history that goes double for speakers who are also Republicans.

Johnson is the sixth Republican elevated to the speakership since 1994, the year the party won its first House majority and elected a speaker of its own for the first time in 40 years. The hard truth is that the five who preceded Johnson (McCarthy, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Dennis Hastert and Newt Gingrich) all saw their time in the office end in relative degrees of defeat or frustration. And to find a Republican speaker who left voluntarily in a moment of victory, moving on to another office, you have to go back to the mid-1920s.

There's been a history of hard landings

The 30-year saga began with Gingrich of Georgia, who was the first member of his party to gain "the big gavel" since the early 1950s and the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Gingrich had been a backbench rabble-rouser since coming to the House in 1978 and built up a cadre of supporters until he won the party's No. 2 power position as minority whip in 1989. He soon eclipsed the party's leader, Robert Michel, who was nearing retirement.

In 1994, two years into the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton, Gingrich organized a campaign around a 10-item agenda called the "Contract with America." It provided a unified message for the party's nominees, who flipped more than 50 seats and stormed into the majority.

Gingrich managed to restore many of the powers of the speakership but clashed repeatedly with Clinton and even with Republican leaders in the Senate. In 1997, in his second Congress as speaker, he barely survived a largely covert challenge from within his own leadership team. And just shy of his fourth anniversary in the job, he was voted out by the full House Republican conference in December 1998.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (center), shown here surrounded by House Republicans, holds up a copy of the "Contract With America" during a speech on April 7, 1995 on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Richard Ellis/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (center), shown here surrounded by House Republicans, holds up a copy of the "Contract With America" during a speech on April 7, 1995 on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

Once Gingrich was gone, the line of succession was not clear. The No. 2 Republican at the time did not have the votes, and the No. 3 declined to run. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee was nominated by the party conference but withdrew after a magazine story accused him of marital infidelity.

The mantle fell to Hastert of Illinois, the chief deputy whip. Like Johnson an era later, Hastert was a relatively quiet member of the leadership who enjoyed goodwill generally in the rank and file. Hastert was speaker through the last two Clinton years and first six of the George W. Bush presidency. But he voluntarily resigned after the GOP lost badly in the 2006 midterms, a defeat Bush called "a thumpin' " at the time.

Those eight years actually made Hastert the longest-serving Republican speaker in history. But any luster left after 2006 was lost when he went to prison for bank fraud charges stemming from hush money payments he had made to a former student he admitted to having sexually abused decades earlier.

The next two Republican speakers would be John Boehner, elevated to the job by the GOP recapture of the House in the "Tea Party" election of 2010. Boehner worked hard to fashion budget deals with both a Democratic President Barack Obama and a Democratic Senate. But his efforts alienated some in his own ranks who in 2015 formed an insurgent group known as the House Freedom Caucus. Increasingly exasperated with his untenable predicament, Boehner simply resigned in October of that year.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (right) and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy walk through the Capitol rotunda on May 17, 2023. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (right) and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy walk through the Capitol rotunda on May 17, 2023.

Here again, the line of succession was not as clear as it appeared. The well-respected No. 2 Republican, Eric Cantor of Virginia, had lost his primary in 2014. The No. 3, McCarthy, soon ran aground over remarks in a TV interview and lacked the votes to be speaker. The party settled on Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who had not sought the gavel but agreed to take it.

Ryan, then just 45, was the youngest speaker in nearly 150 years but had already been party's vice presidential nominee on the 2012 ticket. Once he had Boehner's job, however, he experienced much the same internal strife. Ryan also had a strained relationship with then-President Donald Trump, with whom he had a falling out during the fall 2016 campaign. In April 2018, Ryan said he would not serve another term and left as the party was losing its majority that fall.

More distant memories

Prior to the GOP's 40-year sentence as the minority party, several of its speakers had risen to the top rung largely on their personal popularity among their colleagues. One was Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, who led the party in the House during two brief interludes of majority status after World War II. Both lasted only the minimum two years, the first ending with Democratic Harry S. Truman's surprise White House win in 1948. Martin was back four years later when Eisenhower was first elected president in 1952, but that tour at the top was cut short by his party's sharp losses two years later.

Prior to that, the last Republican speaker had been Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, who died in 1931. Technically, he died as speaker, but his party lost its majority before the next Congress convened and elected a Democrat to the job.

Nicholas Longworth, speaker of the House, holds a gun once owned by famous outlaw Jesse James on Jan. 23, 1930. Bettmann Archive hide caption

Nicholas Longworth, speaker of the House, holds a gun once owned by famous outlaw Jesse James on Jan. 23, 1930.

Although Longworth was speaker for only a little over five years, he was well-regarded and symbolic of Republican prosperity in its heydays under Teddy Roosevelt (his father-in-law) and again in the 1920s. When Congress authorized a new House office building in 1931, shortly after Longworth's death, it was named for him and remains so today.

His predecessor, Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts, also had the top job for less than five years. But when he left after the 1924 session, his party was still firmly in control and had just elected President Calvin Coolidge to a full term. Gillett himself moved on to the Senate.

Longevity has simply not been a hallmark of Republican speakers. The list of the 10 speakers who served in the job longest includes just one Republican (and in the ninth slot at that). That speaker was Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, notorious as the autocratic "Czar Cannon" during three two-year tours as speaker that ended with his party's historic defeat in 1910.

Democrats and durability

Democrats too have had their short speakerships. In 1989 Speaker Jim Wright of Texas resigned under pressure following revelations about a book deal the House Ethics Committee saw as circumventing fundraising rules. Wright had only been in the job a little over two years at the time. Longworth's successor, John "Cactus Jack" Garner of Texas, left the office after just over a year to be Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president.

But as a rule, the Democrats' succession machinery and their regional political balancing long known as the party's "Boston-Austin axis" (or vice versa) helped lend stability.

On that list of the 10 longest-serving speakers, seven are Democrats. Most of them served in that long stretch when their party held the majority for four decades. The most recent Democrat, however, is Nancy Pelosi, still a House member and the House speaker emerita. She comes in at fifth on the longevity roster, having served one day shy of eight years from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023.

Correction April 27, 2024

An earlier version of this story misspelled Barack Obama's first name.

• Mike Johnson