Soldiers and civilians alike sought to make sense of the war following the silencing of the guns with the signing of the armistice in 1918. One of the foremost veteran groups leading this effort was the American Legion, founded in 1919. This World War I veteran organization would provide an outlet for Great War veterans to share camaraderie, interact with their local communities, and ultimately pay homage to their fallen brothers in arms. In line with the national organization's agenda and programs, the American Legion Kings Mountain Post No. 24 in Johnson City, TN executed two very different versions of WWI memorialization, one built in 1922 and another in 1935. These two memorials served the community in vastly different ways throughout the 1900s. The first was a commemorative marker and the second was a community centerpiece. In this paper, I argue that the differences between two World War I memorials in Johnson City are demonstrative of how the community progressively oriented its identity and infrastructures around Great War veterans following the conflict. Johnson City's physical and memorial landscapes changed as the city sought to reconcile the war and its survivors. Each memorial served veterans and the larger community in ways that aligned with both the veterans' needs and larger social contexts of Johnson City at the times of their creations. Ultimately, the memorials were intended to serve very different purposes within the community. Both veterans and nonveterans in the community responded more favorably to the 1935 Johnson City WWI memorial initially, and then continued to utilize it much more frequently throughout the twentieth century. It was a memorial that was intended to be interacted with regularly. The second memorial's central role in the community was cemented by how the memorial's placement and style differed from its predecessor. The second memorial was more accessible to the public, partnered with a more prominent municipal facility, had an expanded scope, and utilized nationalistic iconography. These key differences are a result of the community's increased dedication to Great War veterans by 1935. As care for World War I veterans became a central component of the city, so did memorializing the conflict. / Master of Arts / Between 1922 and 1935, the American Legion Kings Mountain Post No. 24 erected two very different World War I memorials in Johnson City, TN that served the community in very different ways. The first was a memorial placard, and the second was a community centerpiece that hosted both commemorative ceremonies and noncommemorative events. Why did the World War I veterans of Johnson City erect two memorials to the same conflict, and why were they so different from one another? This thesis examines the memorials and their roles in the community in order to demonstrate how World War I reshaped American communities with a vested interest in veteran affairs. World War I forever changed the social, physical, and memorial landscapes of Johnson City. Following World War I, a series of medical, legal, and social veteran infrastructures were developed and established in Johnson City as the community reoriented itself around addressing the rising needs of Great War veterans returning home. The placements, styles, and functions of the memorials mirrored the city’s development into a community dedicated to World War veterans. Caring for Great War veterans became a central component of the city, and its memorialization of the conflict followed suit. World War I veterans were held in high esteem by the community following the conflict. The Legionnaires used that esteem to garner community support for their memorial projects and developed a version of memorialization that the entire community could use.

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE WITS SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND, 2015 / South Africa’s post-apartheid era has, in a space of nearly two decades, experienced a massive memory boom manifest in a plethora of new memorials, monuments, museums and the renaming of streets, parks, dams and buildings. This memorialisation process is intrinsically linked to questions of power, struggles and contestation in the making and remaking of the South African nation. The questions of power, struggle and contestation manifest as a wave of debates on the place of history, collective memory, identity and social cohesion in the inception as well as the functioning of the various memorialisation projects in society. This thesis concludes that debates concerning the meaning(s) as well as the way in which the June 16, 1976 uprisings have been memorialized, has been ongoing for the last three decades, and will continue into the future. This, as the findings bear out, is because the wider contextual situating of collective memory in its intangible and tangible form is intrinsically linked to complex experiences of the past; to ongoing experiments of a “nation” in the making, as well as pressing contemporary social challenges. The thesis also concludes that questions of power, struggle and contestation also manifest as a quest for relevant idioms and aesthetics of re-representation and memorialisation. Further, the thesis makes observations on the politics behind the assembling and the assembled archive as a toolkit in the fashioning of pasts and the making of collective memory. It reflects on the processes of re-thinking and remaking of the June 16, 1976 archive. These conclusions have been arrived at through an investigation of how the memory and meaning of the June 16, 1976 uprisings have been re-constructed, re-represented and fashioned over the last three decades. This was done by tracking and analysing the complex, diverse forms and character of its memorialisation. In the process, the study arrives at a conclusion that the memorialisation of the June 16, 1976 uprisings is characterised by the multiplicity of tangible and intangible features. The intangible features are characterised by forgetting, at one level, and are, on another level, animated through rituals of commemoration, counter- commemoration and memorial debate. The memorial debate on the uprisings is that of unity and diversity, division, contestation and counter-commemoration and essentially irresolvable, as history and memory are tools to address contemporary challenges.

In this paper, I will investigate the digital sphere as a part of the public sphere. Within this framework, I will explore forms of permanent and ephemeral commemoration that take place in the urban environment and in the digital realm, and, in particular, how these dialogue between the online and offline domains. Questioning the permanence of memorials and their relationship with time and space, I will present as a case study “Initiative 19. Februar Hanau”, which was founded in the aftermath of the racist attack that occurred in February 2020 in Hanau, Germany. The initiative operates online via social networks and a website, as well as in a widespread series of events, including recent exhibitions, taking place in different cities across the country. I will question how the digital shapes and affects the act of commemorating online and offline. Analyzing to what extent digital commemoration can be interpreted as an urban and potentially activist practice, I will also reflect upon the role played by the so-called expanded spectator in this process.

This thesis examines the political language and the ideological construction of the national past at the annual commemoration of the April 25 Revolution in the Portuguese parliament. The language of politics during these State commemorations is complex. The speakers of the ceremony are not expected to engage in the everyday politics but to celebrate and remember together the overthrow of the previous regime that occurred on April 25 1974. Nonetheless, behind apparent acts of unity and communion there is political controversy about the nature of the event and its celebration. Mostly this controversy cannot be expressed openly. In order to register the ideological and controversial aspects of these commemorations, the thesis looks at both the overt and the hidden language of the commemorative speeches from left and right political parties. Specifically, the official parliamentary transcripts of the commemorative speeches from left and right political party are analysed at different levels using different methodologies: broad quantitative content analyses of large numbers of speeches and fine critical discursive analysis of specific parts of particular speeches. A broad quantitative content analysis of wole speeches reveals the patterns of themes and terms mentioned in the speakers accounts of the past. By looking at the presence and absence of explicit themes and terms, the analysis suggests that accounts of the past in the parliamentary commemoration of the April Revolution differ along political and ideological lines. This is also apparent in the customary ways of greeting the audience right at the start of the speeches. This analysis combines a quantitative content analysis of the formal greetings over time with an analysis of the rhetorical meanings of particular terms. The analysis of greetings also shows the sexism of the customary and also the development of ritual forms. In order to examine the complexity of this sort of speech, it is necessary to move to in-depth qualitative analysis of parts of specific speeches. The analysis of the beginnings of two speeches given at the 2004 commemoration, namely, from the speaker of the far-right Democratic and Social Centre/Popular Party (CDS-PP) and from the far-left Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), shows that both speakers presented controversial versions of the past but did not do so in direct ways. The speaker from the CDS-PP uses a number of rhetorical devices including omissions and distortion in order to conceal his meanings, while appearing to celebrate a Revolution to which his party was ambivalent. On the other hand, the speaker from the PCP also uses manipulative devices but he does not do so in order to hide the ideology of his message but to make it clearer. The thesis argues for the importance of analysing hidden ideological messages as well as for distinguishing between a speaker manipulating the presentation of their ideology and a speaker manipulating the evidence in order to present their ideology clearer.

Calls for examining the interrelations between individual and collective processes of remembering have been repeatedly made within the field of memory studies. With the tendency being to focus on either the individual or the collective level, there have been few studies that have undertaken this task in an empirically informed manner. This thesis seeks to engage in such an examination by undertaking a multi-level study of the remembrance of the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984. The gas leak in Bhopal (India) was one of the world s worst industrial disasters and has seen a long-running political contestation involving state institutions, social movement organisations (SMOs) and individual survivors. Employing an ethnographic methodology, incorporating interviews, participant observation and archival research, the study seeks to examine similarities and divergences in how these institutional, group-level and individual actors have remembered the disaster. It identifies the factors that modulated these remembrances and focuses on examining the nature of their interrelationship. The study conceptualises remembering as memory-work : an active process of meaning-making in relation to the past. The memory-work of state institutions was examined within the judicial and commemorative domains. The analysis demonstrates how state institutions engaged in a limiting of the meaning of the disaster removing from view the transnational causality of the event and the issue of corporate liability. It tracks how the survivors suffering was dehistoricised and contained within the framework of a localized claims bureaucracy. The examination of SMO memory-work focused on the activities of the two most prominent groups working in Bhopal. The analysis reveals how both organisations emphasise the continuing suffering of the survivors to challenge the state s settlement of the event. However, clear differences are outlined between the two groups in the wider frameworks of meaning employed by them to explain the suffering, assign responsibility and define justice. Memory-work at the individual level was accessed in the memory narratives of individual survivors generated through ethnographic interviews. The study examined how individual survivors have made sense of the lived experience of suffering caused by the disaster and its aftermath. The analysis revealed how the frameworks of meaning imposed by the state are deeply incommensurate with the survivors needs to express the multi-dimensionality of their suffering; it tracks how the state imposed identities are resisted but cannot be entirely overcome in individual remembrance. Engagement with the activities of the SMOs is demonstrated as enabling the development of an alternative activist remembrance for a limited group of survivors. Overall, the thesis seeks to provide a complex and empirically grounded account of the relations between the inner, individual level processes of memory linked to lived experience and the wider, historically inflected, collective and institutional registers of remembrance. The examination of the encounters between these diverse individual and collective remembrances in the context of an on-going political contestation allows the study to contribute to ongoing discussions within the field about memory politics in a global age and memory and justice.

Uppsatsens syfte är att studera porträtteringen av nationell identitet i Don DeLillos Falling Man och Amy Waldmans The Submission i förhållande till efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien utgörs av undersökande och jämförande analyser av romanerna utifrån ett litteratursociologiskt samt postkolonialt perspektiv med fokus på nationalism, religion och commemoration.   Studien har presenterat hur amerikansk identitet har ifrågasatts och problematiserats i romanerna Falling Man och The Submission, och visat hur religion, commemoration och nationalism hänger samman med den amerikanska identiteten. En identitet som visat sig föränderlig och problematisk i efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien har också kunnat visa att böckerna inte ämnar att lyfta fram en gestaltning av identitet som något allenarådande eller fast, utan att de istället visar hur identitet ständigt förändras och skiljer sig från karaktär till karaktär, genom problematiserandet kring tillhörighet, trygghet och trauma.

Motivational changes due to individual differences and situational variations in ingroup identification can influence accessibility of memories of ingroup violence, victimization and glories. In Study 1, high identifiers recalled fewer incidents of ingroup violence and hatred than of ingroup suffering. As well, they recalled fewer incidents of ingroup violence and hatred than did low identifiers. In Study 2, a manipulation of ingroup identity produced shifts in memory. Relative to those in the low identity condition, participants in the high identity condition recalled fewer incidents of violence and hatred and more good deeds by members of their group. Participants in a control condition recalled more positive than negative group actions; this bias was exaggerated in the high identity condition and eliminated in the low identity condition. With respect to memories of ingroup tragedies, Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that experimental reminders of ingroup suffering enhanced participants' sense of connectedness to the ingroup. The findings suggest that memories of ingroup aggressions threaten ingroup identity whereas memories of ingroup suffering enhance ingroup identity. Societal implications of the findings are discussed. The present research informs the literature on reconstructive memory by extending previous findings on the flexibility of personal memories to historical memory.

Résumé français manquant / Résumé en anglais manquant

This thesis examines funerary iconography for evidence of Roman attitudes towards children, childhood and the family. Based on 690 portrait monuments drawn from select areas of the Western Empire, its central hypothesis is that the commemorations are best read as highly artificial constructs which reveal more about the social preoccupations of the commissioners than the lives of the children whom they represent. The first of the seven chapters defines the parameters of the accompanying catalogue and discusses the benefits of studying a diverse range of monuments (rather than isolated "show-pieces"). The methodological section which follows assesses the cultural limitations and identification problems inherent to funerary material and considers how the terms "child" and "portrait" are best defined in this medium. The four subsequent chapters analyse the following key areas: the ages, genders and attributes of children; the presentation and composition of the family; the iconography of surrogate and extended relationships; and the archaeological context of funerary display. In each case any emotional interpretations which surround the material are discussed and then countered with alternative, and better supported, social readings. It is argued that previous research has been based on samples which are too limited in terms of size, genre and geographical scope and influenced too heavily by a desire to prove parental benevolence and the existence of "love" and "affection" within the Roman household. By exposing demographic biases and iconographic problems, it is shown that commissioners were actually using the image of the child for overtly social purposes, with some of the results being subject to substantial, and hitherto unacknowledged, regional variation. The conclusion then reassesses a well-known example to show that while Roman parents did attach importance to their children, funerary evidence can only prove it to be of a social, rather than an emotional, nature.

This study explores the usage of the memory of the bombings of Belgrade from WWII in the time period of Yugoslavia from 1995 until 2003. Considering that Belgrade was bombed by two opposing forces during WWII, once by Nazis in 1941, and the second time by the Allies in 1944, and due to the fact that the exploitation of memory of the two bombings was rather unequal during the Socialist Yugoslavia with the latter bombings being a taboo theme, I was interested in answering following questions: how the two memories were used in the times before, during and after the NATO Air Strikes of Yugoslavia, if the memory of the Allied bombings emerged in the public sphere and how it coexists with the one of the Nazi bombings. My primary sources are articles from "Politika" newspaper issues from commemoration dates during the research time frame from 1995 until 2003. The final conclusion shows the dominant usage of the memory of the Nazi bombings throughout the whole time frame even though we could witness the emergence of the memory of the Allied bombings.