Politics as usual? The Trials and Tribulations of the Law of Historical Memory in Spain

The aim of this article is to evaluate the Law of Historical Memory from a political perspective where politics is understood as "the art of the possible". It will be argued that the Law of Historical Memory is a product of the compromises which characterise the process of politics as usual in a functioning democracy. An analysis of the Law of Historical Memory, therefore, can illuminate the way in which politics functions in Spain today. Two main issues are focused on: the primacy of electoral considerations and the interaction between state and civil society

The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the “Memory Boom” in Contemporary Historical Studies

Jay Winter delivered the following in the form of a lecture at the Canadian War Museum on 31 October 2000. A distinguished academic, Winter has been writing about the cultural history of the First World War for nearly three decades. He has taught at the University of Cambridge in England and is presently at Yale University. Since 1988, he has been a director of the Historial de la grande guerre in Peronne, an important war museum in northern France. In this capacity, he has become familiar with a great many institutions of war and military history around the world and he has great knowledge and familiarity with the important historical and intellectual debates that will be fundamental to the creation of a new Canadian War Museum, which is now slated to open in May 2005. Probably Winter’s best-known book is Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History published in 1995. In it, he argues that the rituals of mourning associated with commemoration after the First World War had a history stretching far back in human life and experience. In this he contradicts the thinking of Canadian historian Modris Eksteins who argued that the Great War marked the birth of the modern age. Lately, Daniel Sherman has proposed that commemorative ceremonies and memorials are significantly politicized in the interests of state control. In the following paper Winter warns against the dangers of collective memory being collapsed into “a set of stories formed by or about the state” while also providing a rich overview of the great importance that attention to memory and culture studies has taken on in contemporary thought. These cannot be ignored in any serious attempt to lay the intellectual foundation of any new museum, and perhaps especially may have specific relevance to a new war museum

Point/Counterpoint: Anchoring Historical Memory

Wednesday, November 19, 2014 saw citizens and students of Gettysburg crowd into the Majestic Theater for the fifty-third annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture. The audience listened attentively as Dr. Nina Silber, a renowned historian of the American Civil War, explored the nuanced application of the memory of Abraham Lincoln during the 1930s and ‘40s, especially as associated with the figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. [excerpt

THE PORTRAYAL OF ANDREJ HLINKA IN SLOVAK HISTORIOGRAPHY

Th e paper analyzes the course of the process of historical research of the personality of Andrej Hlinka. One of the most signifi cant fi gures of the Slovak history in general became the subject of interest of the Slovak historians only gradually, slowly and with big diffi culties. Nevertheless, historians´ opinions which have been formed in particular period connections refl ect specifi - cally and typically the peripeties of the development of the Slovak national issue and phases of interest (disinterest) of historiography in this personality, and they represent a unique source of the view of collective historical memory of the national community, of the formally desired and naturally formed development of the community´s notion of the values of its own past.No historical monograph on Hlinka was published in 1939-1989. However, important references, period evaluations and observations can be found in synthetically oriented works of the following historians: František Hrušovský, František Bokes, Július Mésároš and Ľubomír Lipták and others. Th e personality of Hlinka was either suppressed or evaluated one-sidedly negatively. Th e year 1968 brought a certain change in this direction and revaluation of Hlinka’s personality. Th e period of normalization in 70s and 80s created a larger space to remember Hlinka’s personality, however, its interpretation was again shift ed towards negative side. The social and political change aft er 1989 and current state of research corroborate natural comeback of the personality in its environment, however, they also mirror a disproportion between spontaneously preserved “heritage of (the Slovak) historical memory” (heritage of the memory of majority of the national community, respectively) and institutionally created “memory of the heritage”.

Scraping Down the Past: Memory and Amnesia in W. G. Sebald\u27s Anti-narrative

Vanguard anti-narrativist Galen Strawson declares personal memory unimportant for self-constitution. But what if lapses of personal memory are sustained by a morally reprehensible amnesia about historical events, as happens in the work of German author W. G. Sebald? The importance of memory cannot be downplayed in such cases. Nevertheless, contrary to expectations, a concern for memory needn’t ally one with the narrativist view of the self. Recovery of historical and personal memory results in self-dissolution and not self-unity or understanding in Sebald’s characters. In the end, Sebald shows how memory can be significant, even imperative, within a deeply anti-narrativist outlook on the self, memory, and history

Confronting the Past. Trauma, History and Memory in Wajda’s film

Confronting the Past. Trauma, History and Memory in Wajda’s filmHistorical films are important carriers of collective memory, and as a genre historical films can activate both strong feelings and strong debate. Historical fiction films often tell very accurate and almost documentary stories, but fictional films have the freedom to make historical reality in quite another way than factual historical films. This article deals with some of the most important historical film genres and uses a general theory of genres, emotions, memory and history to analyse the historical films of Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, especially those made post 1989. Dealing with both his heritage drama Pan Tadeusz (1999) and critical historical drama Katyń (2007), the article analyses the ways in which Wajda uses historical narratives to comment on both history and contemporary society, and how this strategy is reflected in all his historical films. The article argues that the traumatic and contrast-filled history of Poland makes historical films especially important and interesting as a critical part of public debate and the reframing and reinterpretation of the past

A brief history of long memory: Hurst, Mandelbrot and the road to ARFIMA

Long memory plays an important role in many fields by determining the behaviour and predictability of systems; for instance, climate, hydrology, finance, networks and DNA sequencing. In particular, it is important to test if a process is exhibiting long memory since that impacts the accuracy and confidence with which one may predict future events on the basis of a small amount of historical data. A major force in the development and study of long memory was the late Benoit B. Mandelbrot. Here we discuss the original motivation of the development of long memory and Mandelbrot's influence on this fascinating field. We will also elucidate the sometimes contrasting approaches to long memory in different scientific communitiesComment: 40 page

Learning from Morella: the memory of the urban form and the dialogical-historical approach in the contemporary design

From the dialogical models defended by Mijai´l Bajti´n (Bakhtin 1982), GIRAS Research Group has analyzed for years the historical urban form and architecture, trying to clarify how the architect can at the same time, innovate and preserve, understanding that in the specific of each place are the seeds for a good modernization. (Muntañola 2016). To understand the relationships between history and memory and to clarify the types of memory that the architect can use to learn from the city, we use Paul Ricoeur’s theory (Ricoeur 2010) and Space Syntax as a theory as well as a meth- od (Hillier 1996). In the case study of Morella, Spain, we will see that the urban form of the historical city has kept in his memory the existence of an old gate of the wall, in a place that people has forgotten. With historical drawings, plans, written sources, with archaeological exploration and with Space Syntax analysis, it will be shown that the memory of the city is present in the constructed form. In Morella, we will find some interesting examples about how the architect can make bridges between the new design and the history of the profession, of the place and of the society, analyzing two heritage buildings restored in the core of the city, the town hall and a church as a health center, and two new buildings outside the wall, the Primary School designed by Miralles & Pino´s and the Secondary School by Helio Piñón, both of them with international awards. (Beltran 2015)Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version