History and Memory
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (US) |
| ISSN | 0935-560X / 1527-1994 |
| Scopus | 5600154341 |
| OpenAlex | S184094801 |
| MAG | 184094801 |
| Website | http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/his |
| Total publications | 276 |
| Coverage period | 1997 - 2025 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 74 |
| Impact factor | 0.375 |
| SJR | 0.366 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 1.3 |
| CiteScore | 0.9 |
| h-index | 4 |
| i10-index | 3 |
| Female authorship share | 50.0% |
History and Memory is a journal dedicated to historical studies, particularly focusing on the social and cultural dimensions of memory. This aligns with social and cultural history, which is a cognate field with significant ethnographic and theoretical intersections with social anthropology
History · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Chinese history and philosophy · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies
Remembering the Psychiatric Patients Exterminated in Poland during World War II
Adopting the perspective of critical disability studies, this article reflects on the Polish cultural memory of the patients of Polish psychiatric hospitals who were exterminated by the Nazis during World War II. Highlighting the limited cultural representation of these individuals in nonfictional and fictionalized historical works, it investigates their status as lesser victims or second-class citizens and their marginal place in the official Po…
Unearthing Site
The 1898 Memorial in Wilmington, North Carolina commemorates a white supremacist coup and massacre of Black citizens, one of the most tragic chapters of the city's history. In the decades that followed, this episode of racial terror was obscured from the historical narrative until the 1990s when commemorative efforts began in earnest. This article explores the palimpsestic site specificity of the 1898 Memorial, arguing that despite its locational…
The 1908 Monument to Bernard Lazare and Its Postcard Legacy
This essay explores the efforts to memorialize Bernard Lazare, a key defender of Alfred Dreyfus, through a monument erected in Nîmes in 1908, which was vandalized nine months after its installation on the instigation of the antisemitic Action Française and later entirely destroyed. On the basis of postcards of the monument, which have preserved its memory, the article explores the symbolic elements of its design, offering insights into the politi…
Normalizing Memory in Reunified Germany
Between 2019 and 2020, the German Bundestag passed legislation to transfer the Stasi Records Archive to the Federal Archives. This article argues that this and related developments are the latest official attempts to normalize memory of the Stasi past in order to integrate it into the "processed" ( aufgearbeitet ) chapters of German history. Examining three decades of German discourse and social activism related to coming to terms with the German…
Pov
Nazi gas chambers are deeply embedded in our collective memory of the Holocaust. However, the challenge of representing these actual and symbolic sites of genocide has posed significant ethical dilemmas for artists working in the postwar years, given the absence of direct witnesses to the crime of gassing humans. Nonetheless, numerous artists have "entered" the gas chambers over the years, thus contesting discursive and visual conventions regardi…
The Earth Does Not Want to Keep Secrets
This article examines two pioneering texts written by Jewish authors who developed an early material-environmental approach to the death camp of Treblinka: Vasily Grossman (1944) and Rachel Auerbach (1947). Both writers visited Treblinka immediately after the war and found themselves compelled to solicit the assistance of nonhuman testimony—the natural environment, everyday objects and human remains—which they transformed into witnesses to a new …
Reburials, Nationalism and Regimes
This article analyzes the body politics of different memory regimes, as manifested by the public burials and reburials of three prominent political and cultural figures in Albania from 1930 to 1978. During this period, Albania experienced the authoritarian monarchical regime of King Zog, followed by the Italian fascist occupation during World War II and the postwar communist regime. Each regime attempted to shape the public memory of Albanian his…
Claiming the Dead
This article examines the Israeli initiative in the 1950s to confer postmortem citizenship upon Holocaust victims. This commemoration initiative, which became a clause in the law establishing Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Center, failed. Jewish communities in the diaspora refused to make their dead an endowment to the State of Israel. Tracing the history of this extraordinary idea and the various discussions about it, I show that …
Via Dolorosa” in the Shtetl
This article analyzes the controversies and debates over the commemoration of the Holocaust in one Polish town, as a case study that demonstrates the tensions, ambivalences and competing emotions surrounding the memory of the Holocaust in postcommunist Poland. The article focuses on the annual Memorial March in honor of the Jewish victims in the town of Olkusz, which evoked deep divisions regarding the meaning of the wartime heritage and the hier…
It’s in the Blood
This article analyzes how settler families in the US South constructed, propagated and perpetuated memories of Indigenous dispossession across generations, portraying themselves as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region’s Native people. Stories of Native American raids on settler households captivated regional attention and were retold in printed newspapers, memoirs, regional histories, and monuments. By the end of the nin…
Funerary Memorials to Victims of the Dictatorships in Spain and Chile
This study examines funerary memorials in Spain and Chile dedicated to victims of political repression, analyzing their roles as sites of memory. These memorials in cemeteries serve as spaces of mourning, solidarity and resistance, highlighting ongoing demands for truth and justice. The research identifies critical similarities and differences shaped by distinct historical and cultural contexts and investigates how these sites negotiate political…
Beyond Antisemitism
On the basis of evidence collected in two research projects separated by almost three decades, the authors interpret the ways in which contemporary Poles (mis)remember former Jewish citizens and the Holocaust. We propose a situational theory of antisemitism which assumes that there are situations in which Poles reproduce antisemitic cultural codes that are taken for granted as elements of their culture, or as apotropaic rituals, unconsciously per…
Tracing the Communist Past
Historical-themed guided tours are a basic format of the touristic storytelling industry. By understanding them as spatially bound rituals of collective gazing in which images of the past are drawn collaboratively by the guide and the tourists, this article argues that guided tours provide a lens through which to examine the making of history. Focusing on commercial communism tours in Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava, the article shows that the prom…
On the Limits of Trauma
A Post/Colonial Lieu de mémoire in India
This article examines the afterlives of Indo-French colonial connections as they are expressed in postcolonial cultural practices surrounding Puducherry's memorial for World War I and subsequent French wars. Tracing the shifting web of memory and meanings woven around the monument across different contexts of local, national and transnational post/colonial memoryscapes, it demonstrates how this colonial heritage and the associated commemorative p…
Hegemony, Resistance and Gradations of Memory
This article explores the political uses of the memory of the Angolan liberation war.It argues that the MPLA's rise to power in post-independence Angola led to the formation of an official state narrative based upon this movement's own memory, which gradually developed a script that follows specific rules.The article explores the politicization of the history of the Angolan liberation struggle by comparing official memories with the countermemori…
The Antirevolutionary Commemoration
The Russian state's commemoration of the centenary of the Russian Revolution was not marked by any national events and there were few official pronouncements. Yet this article argues that the Kremlin did not simply avoid the centenary but drew several important "lessons" from 1917, from the violence and tragedy of revolution to the importance of unity for future prosperity. While these "lessons" did not constitute a single official line, they did…
(Re)Imagining the Capital of the Nation
The article investigates Artur Klinau's Little Guidebook to the Sun City in the light of Belarus's political and cultural context. It considers the book as a stratification of three narrative layers: an autobiographical selective remembrance, a nationalist counternarrative that mythologizes places of memory of the pre-Soviet era and constructs the (illusory) idea of a Belarusian historical continuum rooted in central European traditions, and a vi…
Dissident Bodies
This article studies how independent theater in 1970s Spain challenges the hegemonic narrative of the Spanish transition to democracy as a negotiated and nonconfrontational process. Focusing on four case studies of highly successful plays, it argues that theater offered a space for dissent and for debating the process of democratization. Using archival material and oral sources, it proposes to study what Kate Elswit calls "archives of watching" f…
Twitter as a Mnemonic Medium from an Ecological Perspective
This article examines how the link between two tragic events in Mexican history—the 2014 attack on students from the Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College and the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre—has been represented and performed on Twitter, pursuing two interlinked objectives. The first goal is to explore the memorialization of the Tlatelolco massacre in relation to the Ayotzinapa case within a corpus of 16,706 tweets, showing how this memorialization has broug…
From the Visual to the Textual
“Hollow Victory”
The American Civil War represents an unusual case of the victors ultimately failing to write their story into the history books. Although triumphant Unionists initially constructed a robust and purposeful narrative of the southern "rebellion," their efforts to sustain it were thwarted by the emergence of a sentimental brothers' war tale that excised the active role played by African Americans in the defense of the republic. This article probes th…
“I Am Their Jew”
This article examines the differences in how Holocaust testimony is told and received in Israel and in Germany through an analysis of the unique case study of Karla Raveh (1927–2017). After forty years of silence, Raveh became an admired witness-celebrity in her prewar hometown in Germany, where she spent every summer for thirty years bearing testimony before thousands of Germans. Meanwhile, her testimony received little to no attention in Israel…
A Contested Latecomer
This article traces the debates surrounding the conception of the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism in Munich in order to understand why it took the city whose history is so deeply intertwined with National Socialism so long to acknowledge its dark past. It investigates whether the final conception of this unusual museum is the expression of a new transnational trend that provided new perspectives on memorialization. It a…
Contested Site or Reclaimed Space? Re-membering but Not Honoring the Past on the Empty Pedestal
Debates over contested monuments often focus on the statue, but the pedestal also has significance. In May 2017, the New York City Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers recommended removing the controversial figure of Dr. J. Marion Sims. The base however, was left behind. The separation of sculpture from pedestal creates a space to research, document, commemorate and talk about the interruption of memory. In January 2019…
Some Sense of Time
Introduction
An introductory, agenda setting chapter for the volume, "Remembering and Forgetting on Europe's Southern Periphery
Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India
This article examines how, and why, decaying colonial-era European graveyards in India became targeted for conservation starting in the 1970s by the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA). Cemeteries serve as a barometer signaling how both ex-colonizers and the ex-colonized have assessed colonial spaces, artifacts, and empire more generally after decolonization. Alongside working to preserve graveyards and record tombstone inscr…
Battlefields of Memory
The Slaves of Pikworo
This article examines the trans/formation of a memorial landscape of slavery and the slave trade in Ghana's Upper East Region. It focuses on a former slave camp (Pikworo), which is closely associated with late-nineteenth-century slave raids that play an important role in local memorial and ritual practices. Recently, however, Pikworo has been represented as part of the transatlantic slave route, so as to attract an African American audience. Here…
The Forgotten of This Tribute”
This article uses the centenary of the First World War to explore how colonial categories have been mobilized in memory projects. Focusing on "settler soldiers" from French Algeria, it argues that the centenary continues a long-standing practice of attaching oversimplified singular identities to these men. Using untapped sources, it exposes the gap between these externally assigned labels and the more pluralistic and malleable identifications pos…
The Funeral of Imre Nagy
On 16 June 1958 Imre Nagy, who had been the prime minister of Hungary during the ill-fated Revolution of 1956, was put to death by the Soviet-backed regime of János Kádár and buried in an unmarked grave. Thirty-three years later, in a spectacular reversal of fortune, the communist regime was delegitimized by the funeral and reburial of Imre Nagy. Well over 300,000 Hungarians attended the ceremony, a very sizable portion of the population for a co…
On Guilt Discourse and Other Narratives
Dan Diner, Joel Golb, On Guilt Discourse and Other Narratives: Epistemological Observations regarding the Holocaust, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 301-320
Against All Odds? or the Will to Survive
Gertrud Koch, "Against All Odds" or the Will to Survive: Moral Conclusions from Narrative Closure, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 393-408
See Under
It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless. Suspended in a metal shaft over the sea whose waters commingle Spain and France, these words by Walter Benjamin are etched into a thick plate of glass that keeps the visitor to his memorial from sharing his fate. Descending the vertiginous steps in the shaft, one's own shadow is projected onto the sea…
Political Religion
Philippe Burrin, Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 321-349
Some Thoughts on Kitsch
Eli Friedlander, Some Thoughts on Kitsch, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 376-392
Hitler's Reichstag Speech of 30 January 1939
The most widely known quotation from Hider's public orations is taken from his speech in the German Reichstag on 30 January 1939. Referring to the Jewish question, it contains the macabre prophecy: Today I will be once more a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewr…
Between History and Memory
James E. Young, Between History and Memory: The Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 47-58
Revisiting the Historians' Debate
Reviewed by: The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding (Feminist Constructions) Dominick LaCapra The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding (Feminist Constructions), Bat-Ami Bar On (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 224 pp., cloth $74.00, pbk. $26.95. Inquiring critically into violence from a feminist perspective, The Subject of Violence has broad philosophical and theoretical ambitions. Bat-Ami Bar O…
Nazi Germany and the Jews
Gulie Ne'eman Arad, "Nazi Germany and the Jews": Reflections on a Beginning, a Middle, and an Open End, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 409-433
Shared Memories, Private Recollections
Habent sua fata libelli: The destiny of books (and of human beings) always makes sense, retrospectively. Les cadres sociaux de la memoire (1925) had a real impact only after its author, Maurice Halbwachs, had died at Auschwitz in 1944.1 As has been frequendy noted, since the 1980s a reassessment of national identities both within and outside Europe, on the one hand, and the disappearance of the generation of survivors from the Shoah, on the other…
On Saul Friedl nder
The Logic of Historicization
Jörn Rüsen, William Templer, The Logic of Historicization: Metahistorical Reflections on the Debate between Friedländer and Broszat, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 113-144
The Architects' Debate
The ten-year anniversary of the Historians' Debate provides an opportu nity not only for revisiting the most famous controversy over the Nazi past in recent years but for examining another important, if less well known, struggle over memory from the same period. Nearly a decade before German historians became embroiled in the Historikerstreit, German architects and architectural critics were engaged in a less publicized but equally heated controv…
Farewell to the Era of Contemporaries
Norbert Frei, Farewell to the Era of Contemporaries: National Socialism and Its Historical Examination en route into History, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 59-79
Pride and Memory
José Brunner, Pride and Memory: Nationalism, Narcissism and the Historians' Debates in Germany and Israel, History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), pp. 256-300
German Soldiers and the Holocaust
Recent research on the involvement of the German army in the Holocaust has begun to transform our vmderstanding of the scope, course and context of the Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews. It also has some important implications for the study of the Third Reich, its historiography and the lacunae that can still be identified in the scholarship on the period. In what follows I begin by briefly sketching out some of the distinguishing characteristi…
Collective Memory Divided and Reunited
Memory on Trial in Contemporary France
Historians and Public Memory in Japan
The Task of Testimony
From 1993 to 1997 I worked with Alina Bacall-Zwirn, referred to above as Alina Z., and her family on a book titled No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn. 2 The facts detailed in the above-quoted bibliographic summary of Alina's video testimony, from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, are therefore familiar to me. Yet in reading this electronic record, available to the millions of users of onlin…
Blame, Guilt and Avoidance
The Politics of Memory
“Anne Frank is dead, long live Anne Frank”
Historians and Public Memory in Japan
An intellectual battle divides public life in Japan today. Since 1995, writers calling themselves advocates of a "liberalist view of history" (jiyūshu gi shikan) have attacked academic historiography and the contents of public-school textbooks. Coming from the political right, these critics question the dark narrative of Japanese imperialism and wartime fascism. Historians have responded with a variety of arguments and recently unearthed document…
Rescuing the Person from the Symbol