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Analyzes the ways national histories are told in public representations, with a particular focus on the impact of political transformations on national narratives.

Table of Contents

About the Series vii
Introduction / Lisa Maya Knauer and Daniel J. Walkowitz 1
Monuments: Built and Unbuilt 19
Wallace's Monument and the Resumption of Scotland / Andrew Ross 21
The Fall and Rise of Prague's Marian Column / Cynthia Paces 47
Aborted Identity: The Commission and Omission of a Monument to the Nation, Sri Lanka, circa 1989 / Kanishka Goonewardena 65
Dancing on the Graves of the Dead: Building a World War II Memorial in Post-Soviet Russia / Anna Krylova 83
Museums 103
The Politics of Memory in the Bonn and Berlin Republics / Mary Nolan 105
Remembering the War and the Atomic Bombs: New Museums, New Approaches / Daniel Seltz 127
Cityscapes 147
Touring Harbin's Pasts / James Carter 149
The Palace Ruins and Putting the Lithuanian Nation into Place: Historical Stagings in Vilnius / John Czaplicka 167
Memory Sites: Marked and Unmarked 189
Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile's "Sitios de Memoria" and the History of Torture, Disappearance, and Death / Teresa Meade 191
Commemorating the Past in Postwar El Salvador / Irina Carlota Silber 211
The Politics of Remembrance and the Consumption of Space: Masada in Israeli Memory / Yael Zerubavel 233
Performative Commemorations 253
Music, Memory, and the Politics of Erasure in Nicaragua / T.M. Scruggs 255
Commemorating the Anglo-Boer War in Postapartheid South Africa / Bill Nasson 277
Bibliography 295
Discography 315
Notes on Contributors 317
Index 321

About the Author

Daniel J. Walkowitz is Director of College Honors and Professor of History and Metropolitan Studies at New York University.

Lisa Maya Knauer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African/African-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Reviews

"When issues of history and memory are publicly controversial, the controversy almost always takes a highly particular contextual form. Striking in its combination of intellectual depth and refreshingly concrete detail, this volume's unique contribution is to invite reflection on how quite different situations speak to each other, suggesting more general insights that transcend particular contexts."--Michael Frisch, author of Portraits in Steel "This outstanding collection of essays pushes the boundaries of our understanding of how memory is a powerful force in political transformations around the world. Informed by theoretical writings, but not weighed down by them, the authors tell compelling stories of struggles over memory in a wide range of places. This volume should be read and pondered not only by those thinking and writing about how societies remember but also by those planners and architects and politicians who are rushing to memorialize our own traumatic events."--Max Page, author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940