In 1969, the world was shocked by a series of murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. Although the defendants were sentenced to death in 1971, their sentences were commuted to life with parole in 1972; since 1978, they have been regularly attending parole hearings. Today all of the living defendants remain behind bars. Relying on nearly fifty years of parole hearing transcripts, as well as interviews and archival materials, Hadar Aviram invites readers into the opaque world of the California parole process—a realm of almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures. Yesterday’s Monsters offers a fresh longitudinal perspective on extreme punishment.

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

Julia Creet is an associate professor in the Department of English at York University. --

Law in the modern era is one of the most important of our society's technologies for preserving memory. In helping to construct our memory in certain ways law participates in the writing of our collective history. It plays a crucial role in knitting together our past, present, and future.The essays in this volume present grounded examinations of particular problems, places, and practices and address the ways in which memory works in and through law, the sites of remembrance that law provides, the battles against forgetting that are fought in and around those sites, and the resultant role law plays in constructing history. The writers also inquire about the way history is mobilized in legal decision making, the rhetorical techniques for marshalling and for overcoming precedent, and the different histories that are written in and through the legal process.The contributors are Joan Dayan, Soshana Felman, Dominic La Capra, Reva Siegel, Brook Thomas, and G.

My interest in site-specific research is not random. My mother escaped through the sewers of Breslau, Germany in 1945 (today known as Wroclaw, Poland). My father was born in a country that no longer exists. Their final destination was Johannesburg, South Africa. This is where I enter the narrative. I was born during apartheid and my interest in memory and identity is a result of my historical and political context.’ Each one of us comes with a history, a complex web of DNA and a library of information that shapes who we are and how we view the world. How can we use our own complexities not only to engage with one another but to build it for story content? As an artistic researcher, filmmaker and educator, Tanja Sakota has often thought how to bring this subjective experience into pedagogical practice. Using paired themes of memory and forgetting, segregation and migration, perpetrators and victims, Sakota travels along a timeline of memory as she takes us on a journey through South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Using a camera and short film techniques, she hosts several workshops focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites. The author sits at the core but the book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different participants using the camera to access and unveil personal interpretations of space and place. Questions that underpin the uncovering of memories are: How does one use a camera to unmask invisible memories hidden within sites? How does one remember events that one hasn’t necessarily experienced? How does one use film to interrogate the past from the future present? As the journey evolves, workshop participants and readers alike enter into a conversation around practice-based research, autoethnography and film. Uncovering Memory is not a handbook offering a prescriptive method. Instead, it is a pedagogical text that offers an interactive approach for students and peers to consider, adapt or react to in their own teaching and learning practices. The narrative encourages readers to self-reflect as they explore their own memory using the camera and short film format as an engaging tool for research and knowledge production.

The present volume provides an overview of new forms of popular memory, in particular critical memory, of the Mao era. Focusing on the processes of private production, public dissemination, and social sanctioning of narratives of the past in contemporary China, it examines the relation between popular memories and their social construction as historical knowledge. The three parts of the book are devoted to the shifting boundary between private and public in the press and media, the reconfiguration of elite and popular discourses in cultural productions (film, visual art, and literature), and the emergence of new discourses of knowledge through innovative readings of unofficial sources. Popular memories pose a challenge to the existing historiography of the first thirty years of the People’s Republic of China. Despite the recent backlash, these more critical reflections are beginning to transform the mainstream narrative of the Mao era in China. Public discussions of key episodes in the history of the People’s Republic, in particular the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, the Great Famine of 1959–1961, and the Cultural Revolution, have proliferated in the last fifteen years. These discussions are qualitatively different from previous expressions of traumatic or nostalgic memories of Mao in the 1980s and the 1990s respectively. They reflect a growing dissatisfaction with the authoritarian control over history exercised by the Chinese state, and often they make use of the new spaces provided for counter-hegemonic narratives by social media and the growing private economy in the 2000s. Unofficial or independent journals, self-published books, social media groups, independent documentary films, private museums, oral history projects, and archival research by amateur historians, all of which analyzed in this collection, have contributed to these embryonic public or semi-public dialogues. “An excellent guide to the independent journalism, cultural production, and amateur histories that are transforming the mainstream narrative of the Mao era in China. Rich in detail and sound in analysis, these studies document the emergence of critical memory in Chinese society. A valuable resource for students and scholars.” —Timothy Cheek, University of British Columbia; author of The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History “Popular memories of the Mao era are signposts of contemporary politics and culture. This volume features exciting new research by distinguished scholars. Extremely rich and readable, the chapters in this collection illuminate both China’s past and present. A timely and important contribution.” —Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania; author of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China