Gordon, Alan

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Histoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 325the depth and breadth of vision Hall exhibited in his career on and off the bench(p. 255). As it stands, the biography devotes too much text to Hall’s early career as alawyer and perhaps not enough to his tenure on the Supreme Court and Health Ser-vices Commission. These points of critique aside, Vaughan has written a compellingand scholarly study of one of the most important Canadian jurists of the twentiethcentury. Although Emmett Hall has drawn an earlier biographical effort, Vaughan’sbook will no doubt stand as the definitive work.Eric AdamsUniversity of TorontoWALKOWITZ, Daniel, and Lisa Maya KNAUER (eds.) — Memory and the Impact ofPolitical Transformation in Public Space. Durham and London: Duke UniversityPress, 2004. Pp. 326.Public places are closely connected to collective memory and group identities. Com-munities often imagine national values reflected in public places. Washington’sNational Mall, indeed the whole of Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for the city, was an elabo-rate project intended to vest official public memories and identities in the streetscapeof the city. Streets, intersections, squares, parks are all the sites of major demonstra-tions and confrontations that can lead to the transformation of political cultures, asmarginalized groups make claims to public legitimacy. Sydney’s “Mardi Gras”march, to take but one very recent example, commemorates the struggle for gay andlesbian rights in Australia. Mimicking the Gay Pride movement around the westernworld, it vests historic sites of political struggle — public places — with politicalmemory. But this is, in many ways, simply a modern version of an ancient practice ofclaiming space as part of political transformations. The parades, festivals, and com-memorations of the French Revolution are well studied. There is a literature on medi-aeval commemoration, and classicists and Egyptologists can similarly point to theinterplay of memory and space in ancient societies.Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space continues theexploration of how major political upheavals affect public histories. The cases stud-ied range across 12 countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, South Africa, Israel, China, andChile. Yet these examples show recurring themes and concerns, revealing that, at abasic level, issues of history and memory transcend specific national cultures. Thediversity is, of course, deliberate. As the editors claim, this study is not one of Amer-ican memory, but an effort to “de-centre” the United States in American studies ofpublic memory. Yet, at the same time, the editors make it clear that theirs is verymuch an American study. It was written in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of Sep-tember 2001 and, as the editors note in their introduction, this moment in Americanhistory cannot help but inform how Americans see these issues.This collection of essays aims high. It intends to expand the scope of what is con-sidered public history, examining not only public histories told in monuments andmuseums, but also through cityscapes, songs, and parades. Its strength is this willing-326 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)ness to expand the understanding of public history and public space. Music, forinstance, is a form of shared memory. T. M. Scruggs investigates how music — notjust song lyrics, but musical form — changed alongside the political transformationsof pre- and post-Sandinista Nicaragua. Broadcast over the national airwaves, musicitself becomes a form of public space connected to the shaping of national memories.It is a lesson any student of Canadian broadcast history no doubt recognizes.All the while, the authors remind us that, for every monument raised, for everymemory commemorated, many others remain muted. This is an ambitious project tosee memory where it is and where it is not. Cynthia Paces’s contribution, to take oneexample, examines how the struggles of Czech nationalists and Catholics over themeaning of replacing Prague’s Marian Column, which once stood in the city’s OldTown Square, reflect the country’s twentieth-century political transformations fromHabsburg territory to post-Versailles Czechoslovakia, through Nazi and Soviet dom-ination, and into the post-communist Czech Republic. The square was never empty,neither of memory nor of monuments, but the struggles to shape the square’s mean-ing through a central monument reveal much about the changing political culture ofthe country and its capital city.Taken together, the contributions make an interesting, but somewhat unconvincingwhole. Some of what fails to convince stems from a historian’s particular concerns.The contributors are drawn together from a number of social science disciplines.However, at least half list themselves as historians, so it would seem fair to dwell, fora moment, on historical method. Despite being a book about the past, drawing onideas of history and collective memory, this collection is exceptionally present-minded. Few of the articles deal with long-term transformations in public space. Fewof the individual articles actually deal with the past, other than in descriptive terms.These are not articles about the past so much as they are about using the past in thelate twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One paper, for instance, is writtenalmost entirely from a reading of recent newspapers. A glance through the notes ofthe contributions shows remarkably little archival research, but many secondarysources. This is troubling for a historian. It makes an implicit suggestion that theinterplay between memory and public space is a recent phenomenon, but there is along history of constructing memories in public space. Maurice Halbwachs evendevoted a study to the creation of the memories and places of early Christianity. Yet,while the collective bibliography at the end of the book lists certain key theoreticaltitles, La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte is one of many obvi-ous omissions.However, the most troubling aspect is that few of these contributions make a realeffort to grasp the issues of history and memory distinguished from each other.Events in the past are simply memory, or history, or both. The past here is somethingto be described. Although Pierre Nora’s writings claiming the death of a culture ofmemory and drawing clear distinctions between history and memory are cited, nei-ther the contributors nor the editors take up his claims about the distinctions betweenthe two. In the end, this is what fails to convince: although many of the authors userecent jargon and occasionally cite the classic literature, there is little here to suggesta new or nuanced understanding of public memory. Although some of the individualHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 327cases stand on their own quite nicely, they mostly tread over well-known ideas in awide variety of territories. Certainly this overview does not justly render many of theindividual contributions, but the grand ambition of the project requires a longer viewto be convincing.Alan GordonUniversity of Guelph

Walkowitz, Daniel, and Lisa Maya Knauer (eds.) — Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space

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Walkowitz, Daniel, and Lisa Maya Knauer (eds.) — Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)