Review of War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present by Jay Winter

Review of War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present by Jay Winter

Introduction: Memory, transition and transnationalism in Iberia

This volume brings together a wide range of innovative research across the diverse field of Iberian Studies. It will be of interest to academic staff and research students, and will also provide a resource for undergraduate projects and for all those wishing to deepen their knowledge of the Iberian countries and their relationships with other parts of the world. The collection includes cutting-edge work in the fields of memory politics and historical revisionism, peninsular dictatorships, the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist legacy and transition to democracy, and colonial and postcolonial transnational exchanges between Iberia and other continents on a global scale. Within these core themes, pressing topics such as migrations, resistance, memory, exile and trauma, violence, sexuality and feminism, and their literary and artistic representations form the core of the volume. The 16 chapters are written by established and early career researchers from Brazil, India, Ireland, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the USA

To Teach a Social Studies Concept--Chunk It!

I don\u27t know why they couldn\u27t answer the questions. We covered the subject in our social studies class. Besides, all the answers are in the textbook! Has such a thought ever passed through your mind as you looked with dismay at your class\u27 test results? Unfortunately, this kind of reaction is common to the social studies teacher in our nation\u27s classrooms. Difficulties in learning to read in content area subjects tend to baffle the teacher and present obstacles to the learner. All this can be overcome by a strategy which is based on knowledge of how a student learns to read fluently. One solution to the problem is derived from research findings in the fields of memory processing and reading (Adams, 1967; Smith, 1971, 1975; Wilson, 1966). From memory processing, we will borrow a principle known as chunking and adapt it to the aim of reading, that is, to get meaning from written language

Borderlands between History and Memory

This book offers innovative perspectives on the intersections between history and memory in Central and Eastern European borderlands. It focuses on the case of Latgale, the multicultural region of eastern Latvia which borders Russia, Belarus and Lithuania, and explores the multiple layers of memories and historical narratives about this borderland in Latvian public history. Based on a detailed analysis of national and regional museums, as well as material from interviews and an expert survey, the study examines how different actors and projects negotiate the borderland’s complex history and attempt to shape it into meaningful narratives in the present. Moving beyond binary ethnolinguistic approaches of “Latvian” versus “Russian” interpretations of the past, a more nuanced analytical framework is developed that compares state-level constructions of national master-narratives, the uses of history for local region-building, the persistence of Soviet official narratives, and transnational initiatives aimed at transcending the conceptual borders of the nation-state. The reader will find this to be a fascinating study into the little-known case of Latgale and a valuable contribution to the broader research fields of memory politics and borderlands in the post-Soviet space

Remembering Poland: The Ethics of Cultural Histories

Art Spiegelman\u27s Maus, Cynthia Ozick\u27s The Shawl, and Eva Hoffman\u27s Lost in Translation and Exit into History are recent American texts that draw upon cultural histories of Poland to launch their narratives. Each text confronts and reconstructs fragments of twentieth-century Poland at the interactive sites of collective culture and personal memory. By focusing on the contested relationship between Poles and Jews before, during, and after World War II, these texts dredge up the ghosts of centuries-long ethnic animosities. In the post-Cold War era, wherein Eastern Europe struggles to redefine itself, such texts have a formative influence in re-mapping the future of national identities

The Mnemonic Effect of Choice

Making choices during encoding leads to better memory than having the same choices made for you. Beyond a mnemonic benefit for choosing, our laboratory has shown a benefit for items that have been chosen over those that are not chosen. Though many experiments in the fields of memory and education involve a choice component, little consideration has been paid to how an item’s status as chosen or unchosen affects memory. Prior research comparing memory for chosen and unchosen items has confounded choice and congruity, making the source of the recall benefit unclear. We conducted three experiments to dissociate choice and congruity effects. The first two experiments manipulated both choice and congruity and showed mnemonic benefits for chosen words over unchosen words and for congruent words over incongruent words, but these effects did not interact. In the third experiment, in which participants did not overtly interact with the word that they were selecting, we replicated the choice and congruity effects found in the first two experiments. We also compared recall for word-pairs that were given a “yes” response to those given a “no” response and found both a benefit for congruent words as well as for word-pairs that were given a “yes” response

Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory in the Age of Social Media

This study examines the representation of Holocaust memory through photographs on the social media platforms of Flickr and Instagram. It looks at how visitors – armed with digital cameras and smartphones – depicted their experiences at the former concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme. The study’s arguments are twofold: firstly, social media posts about visits to former concentration camps are a form of Holocaust memory, and secondly, social media allows people from all backgrounds the opportunity to share their memories online. Holocaust memory on social media introduces a new, digital kind of memory called “filtered memory.” This study demonstrates that social media was a form of memory. The photo-based platforms of Flickr and Instagram helped better visualize it: the photographs on these sites were literally and figuratively “filtered.” Users had the ability to select a black and white filter, or ones that lightened or darkened the photographs. Digital cameras and smartphones allowed users to take as many photos as they liked and upload the photo(s) they wished. Figuratively speaking, people chose to present certain parts of their visits on social media platforms. They filtered their experiences and chose the part of their story they wanted to tell. Building from the varied fields of memory studies, history of the Holocaust, visual culture, dark tourism, and public history, this study demonstrates that social media is a digital archive that historians must consider when writing about historical memory in the twenty-first century