Realms of Memory

In 1964 three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in Neshoba County Mississippi for their participation in the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign.  How did the white community silence this past while local African Americans kept it alive? Why did both white and black Neboba Countians ultimately come together to organize two commemorations of these murders with very different outcomes?  Find out from Furman University Professor Claire Whitlinger on the January 7th episode of Realms of Memory.  

For decades the Cold War border between East and West Germany was one of the most militarized places on the planet.  Hundreds of East Germans died and thousands more were imprisoned in their attempts to cross it.  How did this former death strip become Germany’s largest conservation zone, known as the Green Belt?  How did memory become a core feature of the Green Belt and how can mnemonic, or memory strategies, found in the Green Belt help make conservation work more meaningful and lasting?  This is the focus of Bates College Environmental Studies Professor Sonja Pieck’s book Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain.  Episode logo courtesy of Thomas Stephan ©/Thomas Stephan/mail@thomas-stephan.com

How did the death strip that once separated East and West Germany become the country’s largest protected ecological corridor?  Drawing from her recent book, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain, Bates College Environmental Studies Professor Sonja Pieck explains the origins and evolution of what is known as Germany’s Green Belt.  In particular she details how conservation and memory work are interwoven in the transformation and revitalization of the former Cold War border that divided Germany. The full episode airs on December 3rd. 

The Great Depression was perhaps the closest the capitalist system in the United States has ever come to complete collapse.  Equally unprecedented was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal response which dramatically transformed the relationship between government, capitalism, and the American people.  How was it possible that there was no national memorial to Franklin Roosevelt in Washington D.C. until 1997, over fifty years after FDR’s death?  The conundrum of the absence of a shared American memory of FDR and the New Deal response to the Great Depression is the focus of University of Mississippi historian Darren E. Grem’s book project, Hard Times USA: The Great Depression and New Deal in American Memory.

The Great Depression was one of the most seismic events in modern American history.  Equally important was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the crisis which dramatically transformed the role played by the government in the United States and the lives of its citizens.  Why then is there no shared, collective memory of the New Deal and the Great Depression?  Why did it take decades before Franklin Roosevelt was memorialized on the national stage in Washington DC?  In his book project, Hard Times USA: The Great Depression and New Deal in American Memory, University of Mississippi historian Darren E. Grem explores the remembering and forgetting of this traumatic chapter and why it matters in the present.  Tune in on November 5th for my conversation with Darren E. Grem.  

Author, co-author, and co-editor of over twenty books on the history of Ukraine, Georgiy Kaisanov has devoted much of his attention to the study of memory politics.  In Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010s, he reveals how Ukrainian history is based on a revamped, century-old, ethnonationalist history that excludes and alienates a significant part of the population.  Moreover, he highlights the unplanned, haphazard approach to the past driven by the actions and responses of particular interest groups seeking influence and advantage.  Rather than galvanizing the will of the people and harnessing the collective spirit of the nation, the past has been a battlefield that has divided more than united Ukrainians.  

Memories of the past have been central to the process of nation-state building in Ukraine.  Rather than starting anew after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians dusted off a hundred year old ethnic-nationalist history and applied it wholesale to the present.  In Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010, historian Georgiy Kasianov argues that the consequences of the uses of the past have been disastrous.  Rather than forging strong ties to the nation across a culturally diverse population, minority populations have been ignored and even alienated.  For more on the politics of memory in Ukraine past listen to the October 1st episode of Realms of Memory.  

Make America Great Again, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan has become synonymous with his entire political movement.  MAGA, the acronym, is now a catch phrase used for Trump’s most ardent supporters.  Emblazoned on millions of red hats, which Trump himself helped promote, the Make America Great Again slogan lived on, even after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential elections.  With its clear reference to better times in the past, what does Make America Great Again actually refer to? How do Trump’s supporters and opponents understand the slogan?  What does it reveal about how Americans understand their national past?  Find out from historian Matthew Rowley, author of Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again.

Across the political divide Americans view each other with ever deepening sentiments of distrust and suspicion.  Historian Matthew Rowley argues that the absence of shared memories of a national past fuels this polarization and the rise of violence in American politics.  In Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again, Rowley looks at what the published work of American Protestants from across the political spectrum reveals about the challenges and possibilities of forging a common narrative that could bridge the current divide.  

How can the past be turned against its memory keepers?  How can the successes and accomplishments of a person or movement be undone by intentionally misremembering and distorting the past?   University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues that this is precisely what’s been happening with the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  Since the Reagan era the memory of this past has been used by diverse actors on the right to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement.  The memory of Dr. King has been exploited to further the goals of a wide array of conservative groups.  For more, listen to a conversation with Hajar Yazdiha about her book, The Struggle for the People’s King:  How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.

From Latinos and women to the disabled and the LGBTQ community, a wide range of disadvantaged groups have achieved significant legal gains in the United States since the 1960s.  This minority rights revolution inevitably sparked a backlash among white conservatives who felt threatened by change.  In this fierce struggle over the values and character of the nation, University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues that all sides have sought advantage by laying claim to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  To learn more listen to Hajar Yazdiha discuss her recent book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.  Next on the August 6th episode of Realms of Memory.

In the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd the toppling of scores of monuments to the Confederacy made national and international news.  But four years on the vast majority of these monuments remain firmly in place.  University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox spent much of her career studying the women responsible for building most of these monuments.  She decided to write No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice to help communities make informed decisions about what to do with this past.  Her work sheds much needed light on the reasons why these monuments were built, why they have been defended and preserved, and the long struggle to denounce and remove them. 

For communities to determine the fate of the hundreds of remaining monuments to the Confederacy they need to understand the context and purpose for which they were built.  University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox stresses that these monuments were erected to restore and perpetuate a system of white supremacy.  Situated in prominent public spaces, particularly outside courthouses, monuments to the Confederacy worked in tandem with Jim Crow laws and racial terror to create a system of white domination that lasted another hundred years after emancipation.  A conversation with Karen L. Cox about her book, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, coming July 2nd on Realms of Memory.  

As campaign season in the United States kicks into high gear the border has once again become a political football for both the right and left.  University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that these uses and abuses of the border typically rely on collective amnesia about the past.  In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship, Valerio-Jiménez shines a much needed light on how the US-Mexico War created the southern border and what this has meant for Mexicans, from Texas to California, who became American citizens. In particular, he shows how the memory of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war inspired generations of Mexican Americans to fight to achieve the unfulfilled promise of full citizenship rights. 

Fears of the border are reaching fever pitch in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential elections.  Much of the alarm hinges on the forgetting of the US-Mexico War (1846-1848).  University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that it was the United States that invaded and annexed half of Mexico.  In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship, Valerio-Jiménez reveals how the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war, and its unfulfilled promise of full citizenship rights, has never been forgotten by Mexican Americans. Since the mid-nineteenth century, memories of the US-Mexico War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo have inspired successive generations of Mexican Americans to fight for their civil rights.

Americans are living in an age of frenzied memorial making, argues University of Texas at Dallas art and cultural historian Erika Doss.  We saturate the public landscape with memorials to every conceivable cause, aggrieved group, or unsung hero.  What do memorials tell us about Americans and America today? In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss contends that memorials embody public emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger.  They help process tragic events like school shootings or terrorist attacks.  They allow us to express our gratitude for past sacrifices or shame for episodes that run counter to our shared values and ideals.  At their best, memorials allow for our participation in the process of memory making.  They can be powerfully therapeutic, encouraging conversations and engaged, critical thinking about the past.  At their worst, they can entrench us in our emotions, lock us into self-gratulatory modes of thought, or magnify our fears without helping us to understand the hows and whys of what we are memorializing.  

From the 9/11 to the Salem witch trials memorial, University of Texas at Dallas art historian Erika Doss argues that we are living in an age of memorial mania.  In her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss explains how memorials embody and allow for the public expression of emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger.  What are the benefits and drawbacks of today’s memorial culture and what does it reveal about America and Americans?  Find out on the May 7th episode of Realms of Memory.  

It took nearly fifty years before a single dollar was spent on commemorating Emmett Till in the state of Mississippi where he was brutally murdered in August 1955.  Dave Tell, University of Kansas Professor and author of Remembering Emmett Till, argues that we can’t understand the remembering and forgetting of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta where he died without considering the natural and built environment.  From the Tallahatchie River where the fourteen-year-old boy’s body was sunk to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market where the story was set in motion, the buildings and natural features of the Mississippi Delta have had a profound impact on memory of Emmett Till.  

In August 1955 Emmett Till was abducted from his uncle’s home, tortured, shot, bound by barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and sunk in the Tallahatchie River.  The outrage triggered by the photo of the mangled remains of the fourteen-year-old boy’s body in the open cassette at the funeral in Till’s native Chicago rallied many to the cause of the nascent civil rights movement.  University of Kansas Professor Dave Tell, author of Remembering Emmett Till, helps us understand the forces that broke the decades long silence in the Mississippi Delta where the murder took place.  The built and natural environment of the Delta, Tell argues, has had a profound influence on the memory and legacy of the murder.  For my full conversation with Dave Tell, tune into the April 2nd episode of Realms of Memory. 

Beginning in 1880s Africans Americans became the targets of a lynching craze that claimed thousands of lives.  In Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lyching on Black Culture and Memory, University of Oklahoma historian Karlos K. Hill argues that narratives are key to understanding not just what drove the lynching craze but how African Americans responded.  It was the narrative of the black beast rapist that fueled and justified the lyching mania.  African American activists and cultural actors responded with their own victimization and consoling narrative to galvanize public support and to offer examples of courage and heroism to inspire future generations.  Victimization and consoling narratives were both examples of how African Americans found usable pasts to fight against racial violence and injustice.