Remembering Leaders

SECTION 1: How people remember historical events helps to shape the future of the world. Some facts may be conveniently dropped, or information may be framed in a way that creates a different mythological memory of the past. In this way memory is itself a battlefield where competing narratives seek to become the official ones, and then they affect the politics and policies of the future.

SECTION 2: Doug Becker (Professor of International Relations): The study of history, and specifically historical memory, is as much a study of the present as it is the past. History has profound implications for the present and as well as future social, political, [and] cultural implications. In many ways the way that history gets filtered through contemporary political issues by contemporary political actors has these profound implications. It can be wielded as a weapon by different political activists, it [can] be used to create certain stories that justify policies, and it can be used as a wonderful tool to define communities, to define nations, as ways to justify decisions that were made.

SECTION 3: Alex Hinton (Professor of Sociology and Anthropology): …different people have different abilities to control the memory in the sense of having control of state-level institutions that can try to ritualize an act and promote that vision, so different accounts can have different degrees of voice. And if you look through time, what is fascinating is you see certain accounts that may be the predominant one on the state level shift, go out, new ones come in at different times, and there may be a plurality of them, they may be contested, negotiated at a different moment in time.