As Timothy Snyder, historian of Ukraine, reminds us, the myths, memories, and stories about a nation’s past shape its understanding of the present and the future. Further, public memory can obscure the complexities of history; as he writes, “there is a difference between memory, the impressions we are given, and history, the connections that we work to make—if we wish.”1 This insight—that mythic public memory can both create a deceptive understanding of history and have serious and often violent consequences in the present—is something that public historians have long understood. Lost causes and mythic beliefs continue to haunt us.
War, conflict, and memory are central to the contributions in our current issue. In “Memorializing Conflict and History in South Thailand through Museum, Art and Poetry,” Mala Rajo Sathian makes the case for centering artists as creators of counter-histories. Sathian argues that the sometimes-violent conflict between the Malay Muslim minorities...
University of California Press