This paper explores competing narratives of the Stalinist and Soviet past in the Republic of Georgia through examination of two public history sites: the Stalin Museum in Gori and the exhibit of the Soviet Occupation at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. While the former remains a site of Stalin’s cult of personality, largely unaltered even during the “de-Stalinization” campaigns that unfolded in the decades following the dictator’s death in 1953, the latter fails to interrogate Stalin’s unambiguous role in the Bolsheviks’ 1921 invasion and political terror amidst its strong emphasis on the martyrs to the Soviet regime. Both museum sites, we argue, are invested in larger scale political and ideological contestations of Georgia’s past in relation to present concerns that anchor, on the one hand, on economic instability and, on the other, on political assertions of Georgian “Europeanness.” The sites raise important questions about the role museums play in the preservation of a contested past and in shaping divergent visions of national memory and identity.

Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial is an example of one memorial site that has successfully managed to retain relevance for nearly one hundred years by adapting to changes in scholarship and the expectations of its visitors. Initially created as a purely commemorative site, it has evolved into one where visitors can actively engage with the Lincoln story. By embracing an interpretive approach to managing the site, the National Park Service has been able to add an educational component to the experience of visiting the memorial that complements its commemorative nature.

In 1876, officials in Cortland, New York unveiled a bronze and granite Union soldier monument to commemorate the county’s participation in the American Civil War. Over time, the monument’s meanings and importance changed, and in 2013, Cortland officials began an attempt to move it out of the way for a music stage. This case study illustrates how Union monuments (similarly to Confederate monuments) represented local pride, masculine ideals, racial beliefs, and community values. Over time, however, original purposes faded from memory. By debating whether or not the statue should stay or move, Cortland reimagined the monument’s significance to its past, present, and future.

Studies on Chile’s transition to democracy after Pinochet’s regime regarding memory, history, and public space have focused mainly on their massive visual/material expressions, either officially sponsored or created by oppositional activists. Few have studied the battle for memory carried on through alternative means and on a smaller scale by groups excluded both by the retiring dictatorship and the upcoming democracy. This work analyzes how the aesthetic-political actions of the artistic duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis , as openly homosexual activists with intentionally fluid identities, embodied a radical and militant difference from which they actively aimed to publicly challenge and broaden the discussions and political culture by which a “new” country was being thought of and built.

This report from the field examines the interpretation of two notable queer women from Columbus, Georgia: blues musician Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939) and Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers (1917–1967). Although these women maintained complicated relationships with their hometown, the Columbus Museum is utilizing new ways to examine their sexuality in the context of their cultural contributions. Nuanced interpretation of Rainey’s and McCullers’s bisexuality offers opportunities to discuss connections between sexuality, gender, race, and economic realities. In presenting the museum’s efforts to interpret these fascinating personalities through exhibitions and permanent collection artifacts, this article offers ideas, strategies, and questions for public historians to consider in their own practice.

The industrial past has become an inescapable and fundamental component of the identity of the Ruhr region. Throughout the twentieth century the Ruhr acquired a diverse public self-perception—incorporating multiculturalism, football, nationalism, urbanity, and nature—that was strongly imbued by images of the industrial past. Over recent decades, representations of the Ruhr’s industrial heritage have been driven by a desire to build the future of the region on a proud sense of its past. However, there have also been signs of an increasing touristification and commercialization of industrial heritage that is sometimes presented in a self-congratulatory way. Development of a critical “historical culture” involving the region’s industrial past therefore remains a constant challenge.

Sensory experiences are often considered triggers of memory, most famously a little French cake dipped in lime blossom tea. Sense memory can also be evoked in public history research through techniques of elicitation. In this article I reflect on different social science methods for eliciting sound memories such as the use of sonic prompts, emplaced interviewing, and sound walks. I include examples from my research on medical listening. The article considers the relevance of this work for the conduct of oral histories, arguing that such methods “break the frame,” allowing room for collaborative research connections and insights into the otherwise unarticulatable.

Scientists warn about the difficulty of predicting ecological relationships as climate conditions for many places begin to move well outside their historical range of variability. In recent years, ecologists have identified “no-analog” communities, associations of species in the past that arose because of novel climate conditions not found at present. They have suggested that the planet is heading toward a similar period of disappearing climates and “ecological surprises.” What role, if any, can history play as Americans enter that new world?

This essay offers a critical overview of War of 1812 commemoration activities during the first year of the war’s bicentennial. Canada and the United States remember the war differently—when they remember it at all. This essay explores the reasons for the conflict’s marginalization, as well as the sharp contrast in interpretation. These include history, geography, nationalism, and politics. Finally, the essay suggests ways in which public history interpretation might be improved in the future.

Although theatrical representations of the past have been examined by theatre and performance studies scholars, public historians have preferred to focus on historical re-enactments in living history sites, museums, or on film and television. This article argues that theatre is a compelling site for representing and understanding the past through a case study of one of the most performed plays in recent Canadian repertoire, Vern Theissen's Vimy. Drawing on a survey of audience members and the author's experiences as an academic historian working with a national theatre company, it proposes ways in which further study and practice can illuminate our understanding of the public and its pasts.

Across America, National Register Historic Districts have done a better job helping to preserve building stock and stabilize communities than they have of meeting the articulated goal of With a Heritage So Rich , the foundational 1966 study that gave birth to the National Register of Historic Places. According to that report, historic sites were to ““give a sense of orientation to our society”” and help to implant in people ““values of time and place.”” This article looks at the evolution of historic districts in Chicago, Illinois through the lens of public memory. It explores the relationship between ““official”” memory and gentrification, ““vernacular memory”” and community preservation through the story of two waves of National Register District creation in Chicago, first in the 1980s led by real estate developers and a second in the late 1990s.

On August 23, 1927, Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for robbery and murder in Massachusetts. This essay examines the echoes of that event in Boston's commemorative landscape as a means to discuss the relationship between official and vernacular expressions of public memory as well as some of the limitations that interpreting ideological radicalism reveals in public historical practice. It examines the history and discourses surrounding the Sacco and Vanzetti Memorial at the Boston Public Library, the Sacco and Vanzetti Memorial Day Proclamation (1977), and a 2007 anarchist/radical parade and rally in Boston commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the executions.

Controversies about the 1965–66 killings of communists in Indonesia have revolved around questions of “how many?” and “who was responsible?” While there is general agreement that at least 500,000 people were killed, public discourse in Indonesia plays down the significance of the killings by placing the burden of responsibility on the victims. Attempts to create a national reconciliation process have been stalled. By examining the social and cultural problems surrounding the bodies of the victims, this paper demonstrates the complexity of issues of corporeality and haunting. Examples from Bali and Java show how hard it is to memorialize the killings, and thus the difficulties of incorporating the killings into national discourse.

This article describes the founding and work of the District Six Museum. Under the apartheid system, District Six was declared a white-only area. Many residents were forcibly removed, and almost all of the buildings were bulldozed. The District Six Museum was launched in 1994 to keep alive the memories of District Six and displaced people everywhere. It is a space where the forgotten understandings of the past are resuscitated, and where different interpretations of that past are facilitated. The museum also assists in the reconstitution of the community of District Six and Cape Town.

Memoria Abierta 's work responds to the need for a dialogue in Argentina among human rights organizations, the government, and civil society that will stimulate the formation of a collective memory about the history of State-led terrorism in the country. Processing documents, testimonies, and images related to the history of illegal repression in Argentina (c. 1974–1983), and creating a topographical reconstruction of the locations where State-led terrorism occurred poses diverse ethical, technical, and political problems regarding the recollection, description, transmission, and diffusion of the materials of memory. This article describes some of these challenges and how they affect and are shaped by the work of Memoria Abierta.

This essay explores how a place of memory can be used as a crucial tool in peace education activities with students from elementary to high school. It draws on the work of the Peace School of Monte Sole and specifically focuses on the “Peace in Four Voices” summer camp, which brings together youth from conflict regions to foster a culture of peace. The camp is a major activity in the Peace School project, since it is from this ten-year-long experience that the idea of a “Peace School” was conceived of and developed.

This section presents the widely heralded work of Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice in investigating, acknowledging, and recommending amends for the university's relations to slavery, the slave trade, and the long legacy of racial injustice. The committee's chair, James T. Campbell, offers the historian's perspective on the tasks the committee undertook, on what they learned, on the responses of various publics, and on the achievements and effects of the project. Excerpts of the committee's report Slavery and Justice feature the charge to the group, their approaches to the project, their assessment of how similar retrospective justice initiatives inform their work, their conclusions, and an example of their recommendations.

In "Exhibiting Antimodernism: History, Memory and the Aestheticized Past in Mid-Twentieth-Century America," Stuart D. Hobbs explores the reasons why aesthetic concerns have trumped history and turned too many historic house museums into decorative arts museums. Hobbs uses the 1950s restoration of a house designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe as a case study. He argues that the painstaking research required for the restoration created a momentum of its own, and the story of the house as architecture and the story of the interior as decorative arts became the story at this and other historic sites. More fundamentally, though, he maintains that the antimodernism of many history museum professionals drew them to decorative arts interpretations. These antimodernists rejected twentieth century urbanism, mass production, and perceived cultural homogeneity. Anxious about a contemporary American society they interpreted as in decline, antimodernists celebrated an idealized artisan past as a means to cultural renewal.