front cover of The Haunted West
The Haunted West
Memory and Commemoration at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West
Greg Dickinson, Eric Aoki, and Brian L. Ott
University of Alabama Press, 2024

An engrossing exploration of conflicting and complex narratives about the American West and its Native American heritage, violent colonial settlement, and natural history

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Heritage and Hate
Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities
Stephen M. Monroe
University of Alabama Press, 2021
How southern universities continue to wrestle with the words and symbols that embody and perpetuate Old South traditions
 
The US South is a rhetorical landscape that pulsates with division, a place where words and symbols rooted in a deeply problematic past litter the ground and contaminate the soil. Stephen M. Monroe’s provocative study focuses on predominantly white southern universities where Old South rhetoric still reverberates, where rebel flags cast a shadow over attempts at racial harmony, school cheers to reinforce racial barriers, and student yearbooks to create and protect
an oppressive culture of exclusion. Across the region, in college towns like Oxford, Mississippi; Athens, Georgia; and Tuscaloosa, Alabama—communities remain locked in a difficult, recursive, and inherently rhetorical struggle that wrestles with this troubling legacy.

Words, images, and symbols are not merely passive artifacts of southern history, Monroe argues, but formative agents that influence human behavior and shape historical events. Drawing on research from many disciplines, including rhetoric, southern studies, history, sociology, and African American studies, Monroe develops the concept of confederate rhetoric: the collection of Old South words and symbols that have been and remain central to the identity conflicts of the South. He charts examples of such rhetoric at work in southern universities from Reconstruction to the present day.

Tracing the long life and legacy of Old South words and symbols at southern universities, this book provides close and nuanced analysis of the rhetorical conflicts that have resulted at places like the University of Mississippi and the University of Missouri. Some conflicts erupted during the civil rights movement, when the first African American students sought admission to all-white southern universities and colleges, and others are brewing now, as African
Americans (and their progressive white peers) begin to cement genuine agency and voice in these communities. Tensions have been, and remain, high.

Ultimately, Monroe offers hope and optimism, contending that if words and symbols can be used to damage and divide, then words and symbols can also be used to heal and unify. Racist rhetoric can be replaced by antiracist rhetoric. The old South can become new. While resisting naïve or facile arguments, Heritage and Hate ultimately finds the promise of progress within the tremendous power of language.
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Heroes and Villains
Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine
David R. Marples
Central European University Press, 2007
Certain to engender debate in the media, especially in Ukraine itself, as well as the academic community. Using a wide selection of newspapers, journals, monographs, and school textbooks from different regions of the country, the book examines the sensitive issue of the changing perspectives – often shifting 180 degrees – on several events discussed in the new narratives of the Stalin years published in the Ukraine since the late Gorbachev period until 2005. These events were pivotal to Ukrainian history in the 20th century, including the Famine of 1932–33 and Ukrainian insurgency during the war years.
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The High School
Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024
Michael A. Messner
Rutgers University Press, 2025
High school yearbooks provide both a vivid snapshot of student life and a reflection of what the adults in the community valued the most. For instance, athletics are often covered more than academics, and boys’ sports routinely receive more attention than girls’ sports. But how have those values changed over time?
 
In The High School, acclaimed sociologist Michael A. Messner reads through 120 years of El Gabilan, the yearbook from his own alma mater, Salinas High School in California, where his father taught and coached. Treating the yearbooks as a historical archive, Messner makes surprising discoveries about the school he thought he knew so well. For example, over fifty years before Title IX, the earliest yearbooks gave equal spotlights to boys’ and girls’ athletics, while the cheerleaders were all boys.
 
Tracing American life and culture from 1903 to 2024, Messner illuminates shifts in social practices at his high school that reflect broader changes in American culture across the twentieth century. The High School spotlights how the meanings and iconography of certain activities have changed radically over the decades, even as the “sports spirit complex”—involving athletes, cheerleaders, band members, and community boosters—has remained a central part of the high school experience. By exploring evolving sports cultures, socioeconomic conditions, racial demographics, and gender norms, Messner offers a fresh perspective on a defining feature of American teenage life.
 
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Historical Justice and Memory
Edited by Klaus Neumann and Janna Thompson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
Historical Justice and Memory highlights the global movement for historical justice—acknowledging and redressing historic wrongs—as one of the most significant moral and social developments of our times. Such historic wrongs include acts of genocide, slavery, systems of apartheid, the systematic persecution of presumed enemies of the state, colonialism, and the oppression of or discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities.
            The historical justice movement has inspired the spread of truth and reconciliation processes around the world and has pushed governments to make reparations and apologies for past wrongs. It has changed the public understanding of justice and the role of memory. In this book, leading scholars in philosophy, history, political science, and semiotics offer new essays that discuss and assess these momentous global developments. They evaluate the strength and weaknesses of the movement, its accomplishments and failings, its philosophical assumptions and social preconditions, and its prospects for the future.
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Holocaust Icons
Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory
Oren Baruch Stier
Rutgers University Press, 2015
The Holocaust has bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon of intensely powerful symbols, a vocabulary of remembrance that we draw on to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible horror of the Shoah. Engagingly written and illustrated with more than forty black-and-white images, Holocaust Icons probes the history and memory of four of these symbolic relics left in the Holocaust’s wake.
 
Jewish studies scholar Oren Stier offers in this volume new insight into symbols and the symbol-making process, as he traces the lives and afterlives of certain remnants of the Holocaust and their ongoing impact. Stier focuses in particular on four icons: the railway cars that carried Jews to their deaths, symbolizing the mechanics of murder; the Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes you free”) sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, pointing to the insidious logic of the camp system; the number six million that represents an approximation of the number of Jews killed as well as mass murder more generally; and the persona of Anne Frank, associated with victimization. Stier shows how and why these icons—an object, a phrase, a number, and a person—have come to stand in for the Holocaust: where they came from and how they have been used and reproduced; how they are presently at risk from a variety of threats such as commodification; and what the future holds for the memory of the Shoah.
 
In illuminating these icons of the Holocaust, Stier offers valuable new perspective on one of the defining events of the twentieth century. He helps readers understand not only the Holocaust but also the profound nature of historical memory itself.
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How the Military Remembers
Human Rights and Countermemories in Latin America
Edited by Cynthia E. Milton and Michael J. Lazzara
University of Wisconsin Press, 2025
This groundbreaking collection of essays by experts in political science, sociology, history, and literature analyzes the nuanced and often contentious interplay between memory, truth, and accountability in contemporary Latin America. While previous studies have examined democratization efforts (and right-wing backlashes), transitional justice, and victim-oriented narratives since the end of the Cold War, this volume takes a new approach. It convincingly demonstrates the importance of deconstructing the militaries’ own active memory work—or rather countermemory work, a term the contributors employ to refer to military memories that are both counterintuitive and run counter to the “victim-oriented” memories that have historically informed Latin American public memory and human rights activism.

With an eye toward particular cultural, political, and historical contexts of the specific countries involved, the collection emphasizes the continuities that come into relief by taking a broader regional focus. The contributors identify the many subtle ways in which past military perpetrators appropriate mechanisms of accountability and truth-telling to reconfigure the past, muddy the distinctions between perpetrator and victim, and weaponize ways of remembering.
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front cover of Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú
Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú
Sylvanna M. Falcón
University of Illinois Press, 2024
In 2003, Perú’s Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR) issued its groundbreaking final report on the human rights abuses perpetuated by two revolutionary groups and the country’s armed forces and police from 1980 to 2000. Sylvanna M. Falcón examines how local communities in Lima have formed oppositional spaces, movements, and communities to challenge a status quo that erases Perú’s history of internal violence. These counterpublics focus on human rights-oriented memory that acknowledges the legacies of racism and misogyny underlying the violence. Falcón’s decolonial feminist analysis challenges the rise of authoritarianism in democratic societies while exploring the limits of liberalism to counteract it. As she shows, projects shaped by counterpublic memory best equip Perúvians to enact real, liberatory, and transformative justice for human rights violations both past and present.

Engaging and intimate, Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú illuminates the power of human rights and memory work.

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