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Along the winding banks of the Middle Kuskokwim River, stories live in the languages of the land. Shared from our Elders, around kitchen tables on long winter nights and beside summer campfires, these teachings carry the wisdom of the people who have called this place home for generations. Held in Memory, Shared in Story gathers these voices into a collection, a record of resilience and the deep relationship we share with world around us. This book captures the knowledge, shared in writing and orally, of our region and celebrates the storytellers, the listeners, and all who keep these traditions alive. To read these stories is to walk beside the people of the Middle Kuskokwim, to see through their eyes, to hear their laughter, and to understand that the heart of a culture lives in the stories shared across generations.

In the late 1800s, archaeologists began discovering engraved stone plaques in Neolithic (3500-2500 BC) graves in southern Portugal and Spain. About the size of one's palm, usually made of slate, and incised with geometric or, more rarely, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic designs, these plaques have mystified generations of researchers. What do their symbols signify? How were the plaques produced? Were they worn during an individual's lifetime, or only made at the time of their death? Why, indeed, were the plaques made at all?

Employing an eclectic range of theoretical and methodological lenses, Katina Lillios surveys all that is currently known about the Iberian engraved stone plaques and advances her own carefully considered hypotheses about their manufacture and meanings. After analyzing data on the plaques' workmanship and distribution, she builds a convincing case that the majority of the Iberian plaques were genealogical records of the dead that served as durable markers of regional and local group identities. Such records, she argues, would have contributed toward legitimating and perpetuating an ideology of inherited social difference in the Iberian Late Neolithic.

First, Cohn proposes that Faulkner's appeal derives from Spanish American authors' perception of similarities between the South's history and the experiences of their own respective nations. She delineates historical experiences common to the South and Spanish America, including civil wars, defeat and dispossession, regional marginalization, and socio-economic hardship. She also suggests that Spanish American authors found in Faulkner a set of concerns with which they could identify and that, as a result, they were inspired to take up the stylistic innovations characteristic of his writing. The resulting assimilation and adaptation of Euro-American modernism through Faulkner has been an indispensable part of what is known as la nueva narrativa, "the new narrative," as well as of successive movements in Spanish American literature.

From another perspective, Cohn's book shows points of contact between works by other southern and Spanish American novelists without positing relations of influence. Specifically, after identifying common, recurrent themes in modern southern and Spanish American literature in general, Cohn reveals levels of a shared understanding of regional history in Faulkner and Mario Vargas Llosa, in Ralph Ellison and Isabel Allende, as well as in Katherine Anne Porter and Juan Rulfo. Her analyses compare and contrast these authors' shared attempts to provide correctives to official, mainstream historical discourse through alternate, parallel strategies for reconstructing, recording, and reclaiming the past.

In yoking together the South and Spanish America as neighboring spaces with similar personalities, Cohn advances a daring and controversial thesis that both narrows and enhances the frame of comparison between the literatures of the South and Spanish America.

The ruling elite in ancient Rome sought to eradicate even the memory of their deceased opponents through a process now known as damnatio memoriae. These formal and traditional practices included removing the person's name and image from public monuments and inscriptions, making it illegal to speak of him, and forbidding funeral observances and mourning. Paradoxically, however, while these practices dishonored the person's memory, they did not destroy it. Indeed, a later turn of events could restore the offender not only to public favor but also to re-inclusion in the public record.

This book examines the process of purge and rehabilitation of memory in the person of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus(?-394). Charles Hedrick describes how Flavian was condemned for participating in the rebellion against the Christian emperor Theodosius the Great—and then restored to the public record a generation later as members of the newly Christianized senatorial class sought to reconcile their pagan past and Christian present. By selectively remembering and forgetting the actions of Flavian, Hedrick asserts, the Roman elite honored their ancestors while participating in profound social, cultural, and religious change.

The monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, located on Boston Common, stands at a symbolic crossroads of American history. A reminder of the nation's ongoing struggle over race, it captures the Civil War's higher purpose—the end of slavery—and memorializes those black soldiers and white officers who made common cause in the service of freedom. The monument and the saga of the 54 th Massachusetts remain powerful touchstones, inspiring enduring meditations such as Robert Lowell's poem “For the Union Dead” and the popular film Glory. 

This volume brings together the best scholarship on the history of the 54th, the formation of collective memory and identity, and the ways Americans have responded to the story of the regiment and the Saint-Gaudens monument. Contributors use the historical record and popular remembrance of the 54th as a lens for examining race and community in the United States. The essays range in time from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and encompass history, literature, art, music, and popular culture.

In addition to the editors and Colin Powell, who writes about the memory and example of the 54th in his own career, contributors include Stephen Belyea, David W. Blight, Thomas Cripps, Kathryn Greenthal, James Oliver Horton, Edwin S. Redkey, Marilyn Richardson, Kirk Savage, James Smethurst, Cathy Stanton, Helen Vendler, Denise Von Glahn, and Joan Waugh.