Results by title

173 books match the query 'Collective Memory' and 7 start with h

cover of Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities

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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cover of Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine

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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cover of Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historic Identity

Historic Preservation

Collective Memory and Historic Identity

Barthel, Diane

Rutgers University Press, 1996

Historic preservation is a cultural movement gaining momentum and adherents throughout Europe and the United States. How do we decide what to preserve and how to preserve? Who benefits from the efforts of preservationists, curators, developers, and other "symbolic bankers" to safeguard an increasing variety of structures for future generations? Diane Barthel raises these and other questions in this important new book. Taking a comparative approach, Barthel finds that preservation in Britain has largely been an elite enterprise aimed at preserving traditional values. In the United States, by contrast, the pattern is much more dynamic and democratic, though also more permeated by commercialism. Is preservation becoming another means of consuming history, like media representations or "historic" shopping outlets? Or does it have a special significance as a very tangible means of getting in touch with our collective and individual pasts? These and other issues--including war and remembrance, agrarian and industrial preservation, and religious preservation in a secular society--demonstrate the significance of what Barthel calls "the Preservation Project" and why we all have a stake in how our history is reconstructed and interpreted.
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cover of Historical Justice and Memory

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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cover of Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory

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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cover of How the Military Remembers: Human Rights and Countermemories in Latin America

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 examines how Latin American militaries construct memories of past human rights violations in ways that challenge established public memory and human rights discourse. While previous studies have focused on democratization, transitional justice, and victim-centered narratives, this volume takes a different approach. It highlights the importance of deconstructing the military’s own active memory work, or their “countermemories”—a term the editors use to describe military narratives that are both counterintuitive and that run counter to the victim-oriented memories that have long dominated the region’s public memory.

With attention to the distinct cultural, political, and historical contexts across Latin America, the essays reveal how military figures and institutions appropriate mechanisms of truth-telling and accountability to reframe the past, blur the lines between perpetrator and victim, and weaponize memory itself.

Contributors: Mariana Achugar, Gabriela Fried Amilivia, Rebecca Atencio, Jo-Marie Burt, Rachel Hatcher, Nicolás Rodríguez Idárraga, Michael J. Lazzara, Cynthia E. Milton, Carla Granados Moya, María Emma Wills Obregón, Leith Passmore, Valentina Salvi, Gladys Vásquez Zevallos
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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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