scholarly journals History, Commemoration, and Belief: Abraham Lincoln in American Memory, 1945-2001

2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Schwartz ◽  
Howard Schuman

Ever since Maurice Halbwachs's pioneering work, most scholars have been content to explore collective memory through texts and commemorative symbolism. Assuming that a study of collective memory has fuller meaning when it takes into account what ordinary people think about the past, we compare historians' and commemorative agents' representations of Abraham Lincoln to what four national samples of Americans believe about him. Five primary images-Savior of the Union, Great Emancipator, Man of the People, First (Frontier) American, and Self-Made Man-are prominent in the cumulative body of Lincoln representations, but recent surveys show that only one of these images, the Great Emancipator, is dominant within the public. Lincoln's one-dimensional Emancipator image, which differs from the multi—dimensional one evident in a 1945 sample, reflects new perceptions of the Civil War shaped by late twentieth-century minority rights movements. Thus, “bringing men [and women] back in” involves survey evidence being added to historiographic and commemoration analysis to clarify one of sociology's most ambiguous concepts, collective memory, and to explore its social and generational roots.

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


Author(s):  
Jason Knight ◽  
Mohammad Gharipour

How can urban redevelopment benefit existing low-income communities? The history of urban redevelopment is one of disruption of poor communities. Renewal historically offered benefits to the place while pushing out the people. In some cases, displacement is intentional, in others it is unintentional. Often, it is the byproduct of the quest for profits. Regardless of motives, traditional communities, defined by cultural connections, are often disrupted. Disadvantaged neighborhoods include vacant units, which diminish the community and hold back investment. In the postwar period, American cities entered into a program of urban renewal. While this program cleared blight, it also drove displacement among the cities’ poorest and was particularly hard on minority populations clustered in downtown slums. The consequences of these decisions continue to play out today. Concentration of poverty is increasing and American cities are becoming more segregated. As neighborhoods improve, poorer residents are uprooted and forced into even more distressed conditions, elsewhere. This paper examines the history of events impacting urban communities. It further reviews the successes and failures of efforts to benefit low-income communities.


Author(s):  
James Tweedie

This chapter introduces the concept of the “archaeomodern” and its connection to the aging of the quintessential modern medium of film. It sketches the historical and cultural background of the archaeomodern turn in the late twentieth century, including the development of an obsession with the past in the heritage industry and the rise of postmodernism. It then discusses two phenomena from the 1980s and 1990s—a mannerist or baroque revival, and the development of media archaeology—that complicate the habitual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. The introduction suggests that archaeomodern cinema was characterized by the return to failed or abandoned modern experiments and other relics from the modern past.


Temida ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 117-133
Author(s):  
Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic ◽  
Una Radovanovic ◽  
Milica Popovic

The aim of this paper is the presentation and analysis of the data collection methodology and content of the first volume of the Kosovo Memory Book 1998-2000, as an example of collecting and displaying data of war victimisation from the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Analysis of the Kosovo Memory Book is done in the context of so far development of methodology of data collection about war casualities, with examination of effects that data presented in the book may have on both victims and restoring of broken relationships among people. First, it provides an overview of the methodology used and data obtained, and then the methodology and data, as well as images of conflicts that established data provide and their consequences are discussed and analyzed.


1996 ◽  
pp. 415-426
Author(s):  
Joseph Dan

This chapter examines the third century of hasidism, considered the most enduring phenomenon in Orthodox Judaism in modern times. Gershom Scholem described hasidism as the ‘last phase’ in a Jewish mystical tradition that spanned nearly two millennia. Yet at the conclusion of his account of the movement in the last chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, he appeared, with some regret, to view his subject as a phenomenon of the past. The contrast between this view of hasidic history and the reality of Jewish life in the late twentieth century could not be greater. The hasidism of today cannot be treated as a lifeless relic from the past. It appears to have made a complete adjustment to twentieth-century technology, the mass media, and the intricate politics of democratic societies without surrendering its traditional identity in the process.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco

This chapter talks about the people who are creating and maintaining projects that memorialize both the Jewish life that existed in Polish Galicia for centuries and the enormity of the Holocaust during which it was destroyed. It discloses the public acknowledgment of the Jewish heritage that has been ongoing since Poland regained its democratic freedom in 1989, which led to the revival of Jewish life. It also describes the main Holocaust memorial in Kraków, which is comprised of symbolic abandoned chairs scattered through an entire city to highlight the Jewish absence. The chapter mentions non-Jewish Poles who have become aware of the past in Poland that included Jews and Jewish culture. It details post-Holocaust Poland in the 1970s that was severely restricted and in danger of facing extinction as 90 percent of Holocaust survivors had emigrated.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.


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