About Public Memory

Here are a small set of keywords, which may help you further think about the sites you visit here and more broadly about memory sites--national parks, museums, local statues, annual events--you encounter in your life:

Memory sits next to "history." History is thought of as the official facts, figures, and documented stories through which we understand our shared past. Memory is more personal, evolving, and fragile than the authority history claims to have. Memory happens at many levels: individual, familial, community, state, regional, national, and global. Memories are stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our individual and shared pasts. Memory often has more feelings attached to it than history does because memory comes from within us (as individuals and groups). As we learn about new perspectives and continue living, memories evolve. They can also be changed due to forgetting and to the influence of the stories and narratives that shape us.

Public Memory sits under the broader idea of memory. When a memory is shared in community and when the site or practices of remembering together ("commemoration") are located in places that are accessible to anyone, public memory can occur. Washington DC is full of public memory sites, from the Vietnam Memorial to the Mary McLeod Bethune Statue to the National Museum of the American Indian. On a local scale, you may have a bench dedicated to a family, a plaque on a building honoring its builders, or a mural telling the story of an important group of people. Memories are also shared through stories in our newspapers, online though blogs and social media, and in everyday conversation ("Did you ever meet Pat, who helped start our local soup kitchen?"). Once you start noticing, you'll find rich "memoryscapes" or landscapes all around us. 

Forgetting comes up when we talk about memory because we simply cannot remember everything. As humans--even armed with computers, libraries, archives, and other "technologies of memory"--we select what to remember. By selecting some memories, we necessarily forget others. Sometimes forgetting can be purposeful ("I don't want to remember that awful time"), while other times, memories silently slip away. Like remembering, forgetting happens at different levels: individual, community, institutional, national. When we make time to reflect, we might ask ourselves why some memories are cherished while others are let go or even erased. These decisions shape our identities. 

Nostalgia is a longing for the past: "remember back then...?" Some longings are sweet, while others might make us shudder. Just like there are different kinds of forgetting, nostalgia takes different forms, too. One kind is a longing to return to "the good ol' days" or "restorative nostalgia." Those days may seem simpler, yet part of the fantasy of nostalgia is romanticizing what was. To blend two sayings, "the grass is always greener in the good ol' days." Another kind of nostalgia is "reflective." In this practice, we look back to times gone by and think about the good and the bad, and we use this pondering to think about the present and the future. Reflective nostalgia can help us consider who we are--as individuals and as communities--and who we want to be. 

Rhetoric is how words, visuals, places, and practices shape our understanding of and co-existence in the world. In terms of public memory, innumerable rhetorical decisions are made about whom to remember, where and how to remember them, what to name those sites and how to describe those people/places/events, what photos or visuals to use, and what stories to tell. In other words, even if we agree that a particular memory is important, how we story that memory is important because, just as noted above with regards to forgetting, telling the whole story is impossible. Our stories are always partial. Sometimes, when new information becomes available, we re-story memories. The rhetoric of how we story memories is a complicated art and science because our stories don't just include and exclude certain facts or stories...they can include and exclude people in our communities as well. Shared memories are central to how we feel a sense of belonging (or not).