Realms of Memory

From Spain to the Baltic States Europe is littered with sites connected to the personal lives of former dictators.  Birthplaces, childhood homes, summer and winter residences, mausoleums and tombs these sites of dictators can be powerful poles of attraction for extremists, nostalgists, and dark tourists.  They can also offer opportunities to bolster democratic systems by educating citizens about difficult pasts. How have Europeans ...

Continental Europe is littered with the memory sites of past dictators.  From birthplaces to summer residences, these remains from Europe’s darkest chapters present serious challenges to the democratic present.  How do Europeans confront this past?  Find out from historian  Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, author of Sites of the Dictators: Memories of Authoritarian Europe, 1945-2020, on the April 1st episode of the Realms of Memory podcas...

The National Rifle Association, known simply as the NRA, is often cast as a giant bogeyman for proponents of gun reform.  Fears about the NRA are largely based on a misreading and misunderstanding of the organization as a political lobby whose influence peddling in Washington is the chief impediment to sensible gun reform. Entirely off the radar is the true source of power and influence of the NRA, its ability to shape a dynamic Am...

The National Rifle Association is often understood as a powerful political lobby able to influence politicians and shape legislation.  University of the Fraser Valley political scientist Noah Schwartz argues that the true power of the NRA is how it uses storytelling and memory.  Through its extensive cultural, educational, and communications resources, the stories and memories circulated by the NRA have much to do with how American...

The 9/11 2001 attacks on America unleashed a surge of memorial work unmatched since the Civil War.  New York City became a magnet for billions of dollars of spending on the construction of a memorial, museum, and high profile projects such as One World Trade Centre and the Oculus.  What do these projects reveal about the nature, constraints, and abuses of 9/11 memory? To what extent have they helped or hindered American efforts to ...

The attacks of September 11th 2001 challenged core beliefs about how Americans understand themselves, their relationship to others and their place in the world.  How Americans responded to the attacks through their memorial work and the rebuilding of ground zero in New York City is the focus of Marita Sturken’s book Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums and Architecture in the Post 9/11 Era.  A conversation with New York...

In 1989 and 2004 something unusual happened in the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi.  After decades of silence whites finally joined their black neighbors in commemorating the 1964 murders of three young civil rights workers.  What was different about 2004, however, was that the commemoration was just the beginning. The organizers forged an identity, as the Philadelphia Coalition, and went on to achieve several t...

In 1964 three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in Neshoba County Mississippi for their participation in the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign.  How did the white community silence this past while local African Americans kept it alive? Why did both white and black Neboba Countians ultimately come together to organize two commemorations of these murders with very different outcomes?  Find out from Furman Uni...

For decades the Cold War border between East and West Germany was one of the most militarized places on the planet.  Hundreds of East Germans died and thousands more were imprisoned in their attempts to cross it.  How did this former death strip become Germany’s largest conservation zone, known as the Green Belt?  How did memory become a core feature of the Green Belt and how can mnemonic, or memory strategies, found in the Green B...

How did the death strip that once separated East and West Germany become the country’s largest protected ecological corridor?  Drawing from her recent book, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain, Bates College Environmental Studies Professor Sonja Pieck explains the origins and evolution of what is known as Germany’s Green Belt.  In particular she details how conservation and memory work a...

The Great Depression was perhaps the closest the capitalist system in the United States has ever come to complete collapse.  Equally unprecedented was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal response which dramatically transformed the relationship between government, capitalism, and the American people.  How was it possible that there was no national memorial to Franklin Roosevelt in Washington D.C. until 1997, over fifty years after FDR’s d...

The Great Depression was one of the most seismic events in modern American history.  Equally important was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the crisis which dramatically transformed the role played by the government in the United States and the lives of its citizens.  Why then is there no shared, collective memory of the New Deal and the Great Depression?  Why did it take decades before Franklin Roosevelt was memorialized ...

Author, co-author, and co-editor of over twenty books on the history of Ukraine, Georgiy Kaisanov has devoted much of his attention to the study of memory politics.  In Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010s, he reveals how Ukrainian history is based on a revamped, century-old, ethnonationalist history that excludes and alienates a significant part of the population.  Moreover, he highlights the unp...

Memories of the past have been central to the process of nation-state building in Ukraine.  Rather than starting anew after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians dusted off a hundred year old ethnic-nationalist history and applied it wholesale to the present.  In Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010, historian Georgiy Kasianov argues that the consequences of the uses of the past have been di...

Make America Great Again, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan has become synonymous with his entire political movement.  MAGA, the acronym, is now a catch phrase used for Trump’s most ardent supporters.  Emblazoned on millions of red hats, which Trump himself helped promote, the Make America Great Again slogan lived on, even after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential elections.  With its clear reference to better ti...

Across the political divide Americans view each other with ever deepening sentiments of distrust and suspicion.  Historian Matthew Rowley argues that the absence of shared memories of a national past fuels this polarization and the rise of violence in American politics.  In Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again, Rowley looks at what the published work of American Protestants from across the political spectru...

How can the past be turned against its memory keepers?  How can the successes and accomplishments of a person or movement be undone by intentionally misremembering and distorting the past?   University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues that this is precisely what’s been happening with the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  Since the Reagan era the memory of this past has been used...

From Latinos and women to the disabled and the LGBTQ community, a wide range of disadvantaged groups have achieved significant legal gains in the United States since the 1960s.  This minority rights revolution inevitably sparked a backlash among white conservatives who felt threatened by change.  In this fierce struggle over the values and character of the nation, University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues t...

In the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd the toppling of scores of monuments to the Confederacy made national and international news.  But four years on the vast majority of these monuments remain firmly in place.  University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox spent much of her career studying the women responsible for building most of these monuments.  She decided to write No Common G...