Research in collective memory is a relatively new area capturing the interest of scholars in social psychology, memory, sociology, and anthropology. The core idea is that collective attitudes and behaviors are created and shared through common experiences and communication among a cohort of people. For example, people born between 1940 and 1960 are often defined via the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War. Their parents typically experienced lesser impact from these events. Papers about collective memory have appeared in the literature under different guises for the last hundred years. Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Jung's ideas on the collective unconscious, and McDougall's speculation on the group mind posited that identity and action could be viewed as resulting from the shared development of a culture. Halbwachs, a French social psychologist (1877-1945) who was the first to write in detail about the nature of collective memory, argued that basic memory processes were all social. That is, people remember only those events that they have repeated and elaborated in their discussions with others. In the last several years, there has been a resurgence of interest in this general topic because it addresses some fundamental questions about memory and social processes. Work closely related to these questions deals with the nature of autobiographical memory, traumatic experience and reconstructive memory, and social sharing of memories. This book brings together an international group of researchers who have been empirically studying some basic tenets of collective memory.

"Japan has long wrestled with the memories and legacies of World War II. In the aftermath of defeat, war memory developed as an integral part of particular and divergent approaches to postwar democracy. In the last six decades, the demands placed upon postwar democracy have shifted considerably—from social protest through high economic growth to Japan’s relations in Asia—and the meanings of the war shifted with them. This book unravels the political dynamics that governed the place of war memory in public life. Far from reconciling with the victims of Japanese imperialism, successive conservative administrations have left the memory of the war to representatives of special interests and citizen movements, all of whom used war memory to further their own interests. Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five prominent civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere. The history of these domestic conflicts—over the commemoration of the war dead, the manipulation of national symbols, the teaching of history, or the articulation of relations with China and Korea—is crucial to the current discourse about apology and reconciliation in East Asia, and provides essential context for the global debate on war memory."

A transnational history of the first urban bombing campaign, when Irish nationalists targeted symbolic British public buildings in the 1880s.

Explores the origins and nature of political culture in Ohio from the American Revolution until the Civil War. Essays examine such topics as voting practices, the role of the state in national economic development, and the relationship between religion and politics.

These studies examine the ways in which succeeding democratic regimes have dealt with, or have ignored (and in several cases sugar-coated) an authoritarian or totalitarian past from 1943 to the present. They treat the relationship with democratization and the different ways in which collective memory is formed and dealt with, or ignored and suppressed. Previous books have examined only restricted sets of countries, such as western or eastern Europe, or Latin America. The present volume treats a broader range of cases than any preceding account, and also a much broader time-span, investigating diverse historical and cultural contexts, and the role of national identity and nationalism, studying the aftermath of both fascist and communist regimes in both Europe and Asia in an interdisciplinary framework, while the conclusion provides a more complete comparative perspective than will be found in any other work. The book will be of interest to historians and political scientists, and to those interested in fascism, communism, legacies of war, democratization, collective memory and transitional justice. This book was previously published as a special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions.