The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over themovement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past twodecades. How the civil rights movement is currently being rememberedin American politics and culture - and why it matters - is the commontheme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection.Memories of the movement are being created and maintained - in waysand for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive - throughmemorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even streetnames.

Reflecting the growing interest of historians in memory studies, this edited collection examines the relationship between memory and global social movements from 1848 to the present. For a long time, there has been little attempt by historians to consider memory and social activism in an integrated, systematic, and comparative way. However, in recent years, scholars have demonstrated that social movements rely on collective memories to assert claims, mobilize supporters, and legitimize their political visions, while also helping to further shape collective memories. This book delves into the synergies between memory studies and social movements, exploring how social movements have been constructing and creating memories of their own activity, how specific landscapes of memory have influenced social movements, and how activists have used memory as a cultural resource to further their own goals and ambitions. The case studies presented cover a range of different types of political activism, including the fights for workers’, gay, feminist, and pacifist rights, as well as ecological, urban, and far-right movements across the globe, portraying the diverse interrelations that exist between social movements and collective memory.

This book explores the relationship between diverse social movements and Marxist historical cultures during the second half of the twentieth century in Western Europe, with special emphasis on the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy. During the Cold War, Marxist ideas and understandings of history informed not only the traditional Communist Parties in Western Europe, but also influenced a range of new social movements that emerged in the 1970s in the wake of the 1968 student rebellions. The generation of 1968 was strongly influenced by neo-Marxist ideas that they subsequently carried into the new social movements. The volume asks how Marxist historical cultures influenced third world movements, anti-fascist movements, the peace movement and a whole host of other new social movements that signaled a new vibrancy of civil society in Western Europe from the 1970s onwards.

Essays in Memory of Jan-Georg Deutsch The volume observes some of the principles that drove Prof. Jan-Georg Deutsch's research: highlighting present-day politics for the way they shape historical remembrance, learning from people on the ground through fieldwork and oral history, and bringing various parts of the African continent into discussion with one another. From Cape Town to Charlottesville, many societies are grappling with historical consciousness and the production of public memory. In particular, how and why societies remember and forget, what should serve as symbols of collective memory, and whether there exists space for multiple memory cultures are questions being vigorously debated once again. These discussions present particular challenges not only to official memory bound to ideological constructions of nationhood but also to the teaching of history and its links to social justice movements. The volume re-centres Africa and African history in memory studies, with each chapter drawing parallels to comparable cases in Africa and the world. An underlying assumption is that what can be learned from the politics of historical memory in Africa will have relevance for contemporary politics globally and for understanding how memories can be mobilised for political ends.

In historical studies, 'collective memory' is most often viewed as the product of nationalizing strategies carried out by political élites in the hope to create homogeneous nation-states. In contrast, this book asserts that collective memories develop out of a never-ending, triangular negotiation between local, national and transnational actors.

Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

On the surface, historical scholarship might seem thoroughly incompatible with political engagement: the ideal historian, many imagine, is a disinterested observer focused exclusively on the past. In truth, however, political action and historical research have been deeply intertwined for as long as the historical profession has existed. In this insightful collection, practicing historians analyze, reflect on, and share their experiences of this complex relationship. From the influence of historical scholarship on world political leaders to the present-day participation of researchers in post-conflict societies and the Occupy movement, these studies afford distinctive, humane, and stimulating views on historical practice and practitioners

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

Remembering Social Movements offers a comparative historical examination of the relations between social movements and collective memory. A detailed historiographical and theoretical review of the field introduces the reader to five key concepts to help guide analysis: repertoires of contention, historical events, generations, collective identities, and emotions. The book examines how social movements act to shape public memory as well as how memory plays an important role within social movements through 15 historical case studies, spanning labour, feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, and urban movements, as well as specific examples of ‘memory activism’ from the 19th century to the 21st century. These include transnational and explicitly comparative case studies, in addition to cases rooted in German, Australian, Indian, and American history, ensuring that the reader gains a real insight into the remembrance of social activism across the globe and in different contexts. The book concludes with an epilogue from a prominent Memory Studies scholar. Bringing together the previously disparate fields of Memory Studies and Social Movement Studies, this book systematically scrutinises the two-way relationship between memory and activism and uses case studies to ground students while offering analytical tools for the reader.