Chronicles the major traumas of the 20th century in America -- the Depression, Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Vietnam, Watergate, Three Mile Island, the Challenger explosion -- how we responded to them as a nation, and what our responses mean.

A fascinating exploration of our evolving national psyche, this book chronicles major traumas in recent American history - from the Depression and Pearl Harbor, to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., to Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Columbine - how we responded to them as a nation, and what our responses mean. Reflecting on American popular culture as well as the media, this edition includes a new chapter on 9/11 and other acts of terror within the United States, as well as coverage of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. New student-friendly features, including discussion questions and "Symbolic Events" boxes in each chapter, give the book added value as a classroom supplement.

In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of "cultural trauma"—and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the "meaning making process" as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.

Five sociologists develop a theoretical model of 'cultural trauma' & build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new & binding understandings of social responsibility.

Drawing on cultural trauma theory, this book investigates how collective memory of the Nanjing Massacre is fashioned in China and how the mass media, political power and public praxis jointly shape the politics and culture of memory in contemporary China. Allowing for the dimensions of history and different mediating spaces, the authors first conduct textual analysis of news reports from traditional media since the event took place, revealing that the significance of the Massacre was initially portrayed as a local incident before its construction as a national trauma and finally a collective memory. In a study of physical and online memorial spaces, including the Memorial Hall, commemorative activities on the Internet and new media platforms, the book unveils the production and reproduction of trauma narratives as well as how these narratives have been challenged. The final part further studies the interactions between media and other institutional settings while exploring issues of global memory and reconciliation in East Asia. The title will be an essential read for anyone interested in memory studies, media and communication, and particularly the collective memory of the Nanjing Massacre.

In this book, Ron Eyerman explores the formation of the African-American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as personal experience, but as collective memory: a pervasive remembrance that grounded a people's sense of itself. Combining a broad narrative sweep with more detailed studies of important events and individuals, Eyerman reaches from Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, the New Deal and the Second World War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. He offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, as well as providing a compelling account of the birth of African-American identity. Anyone interested in questions of assimilation, multiculturalism and postcolonialism will find this book indispensable.

Focusing on three seminal cases of military defeat--the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I--Wolfgang Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations to the experience of loss on the battlefield. Drawing on reactions from every level of society, Schivelbusch charts the narratives defeated nations construct and finds remarkable similarities across cultures. Eloquently and vibrantly told, The Culture of Defeat is a brilliant and provocative tour de force of history.

Collective Traumas is about the traumatic European history of the 20th century - war, genocide, dictatorship, ethnic cleansing - and how individuals, communities and nations have dealt with their dark past through remembrance, historiography and legal settlements. Memories, and especially collective memories, serve as foundations for national identities and are politically charged. Regardless whether memory is used to support or to challenge established ideologies, it is inevitably subject to political tensions. Consequently, memory, history and amnesia tend to be used and abused for different political and ideological purposes. From the perspectives of historical, literary and visual studies the essays focus on how the experiences of war and profound conflict have been represented and remembered in different national cultures and communities. This volume is a vital contribution to memory studies and trauma theory. Collective Traumas is a result of the multidisciplinary research project on Memory Culture that was initiated in 2002 at Karlstad University, Sweden. A previous publication with Peter Lang is Memory Work: The Theory and Practice of Memory (2005).

How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the “traces” of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale. Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers—photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets—embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. Her book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French filmmaker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988—part of the “post-memory” generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive. Boreth Ly’s poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. Her interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed, including photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, she shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

Memory, Trauma and World Politics focuses on the effect that the memory of traumatic episodes (especially war and genocide) has on shaping contemporary political identities. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book is an incisive treatment of the ways in which the study of social memory can inform global politics analysis.