There are few terms or concepts that have, in the last twenty or so years, rivaled "collective memory" for attention in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, use of the term has extended far beyond scholarship to the realm of politics and journalism, where it has appeared in speeches at the centers of power and on the front pages of the world's leading newspapers. The current efflorescence of interest in memory, however, is no mere passing fad: it is a hallmark characteristic of our age and a crucial site for understanding our present social, political, and cultural conditions. Scholars and others in numerous fields have thus employed the concept of collective memory, sociological in origin, to guide their inquiries into diverse, though allegedly connected, phenomena. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of confusion about the meaning, origin, and implication of the term and the field of inquiry it underwrites. The Collective Memory Reader presents, organizes, and evaluates past work and contemporary contributions on the questions raised under the rubric of collective memory. Combining seminal texts, hard-to-find classics, previously untranslated references, and contemporary landmarks, it will serve as an essential resource for teaching and research in the field. In addition, in both its selections as well as in its editorial materials, it suggests a novel life-story for the field, one that appreciates recent innovations but only against the background of a long history. In addition to its major editorial introduction, which outlines a useful past for contemporary memory studies, The Collective Memory Reader includes five sections-Precursors and Classics; History, Memory, and Identity; Power, Politics, and Contestation; Media and Modes of Transmission; Memory, Justice, and the Contemporary Epoch-comprising ninety-one texts. In addition to the essay introducing the entire volume, a brief editorial essay introduces each of the sections, while brief capsules frame each of the 91 texts.

Menacing, nerve-racking, uncomfortably intrusive, the high school reunion has become a dreaded encounter with the past and present for many Americans. It is a moment of both heightened self-awareness and public presentation, insisting that people account for themselves, not merely to their own satisfaction, but to the satisfaction of others as well. For the author, this situation presents an ideal forum in which to explore the ongoing construction of identity in American society, and, perhaps, to ascertain just how people have managed to make sense of their lives, from then to now. As autobiographical occasions, reunions prompt us to examine our own life narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we have come to be that person. But at the same time, they threaten the integrity of those very stories, subjecting them to the scrutiny of others whose memories of the past and ourselves may be altogether different from our own. Reunions, then, engender a fragile community held together by the resources of a shared past, yet imperiled by the tensions of competing histories. Inevitabley, they force a kind of biographical confrontation. This book explores that struggle, the desire to resolve the tensions between public conceptions and internal understandings, to maintain a sense of continuity between past and present lives, and to lay claim to both an integrated self and a unified life history.

How does a society cope with the challenge of acknowledging and commemorating difficult aspects of its past? In Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi develops a timely sociology of commemoration, drawing on the public memory of Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv in 1995. She identifies and analyzes the building blocks from which commemoration is made: agency, space, time, and narrative. Acting as a guide, she leads the reader through monuments and gravestones, memorial services and political demonstrations, rituals both moving and banal, and individuals determined to remember, as well as those who wish to forget. Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration examines the meanings, boundaries, opportunities, and limits of commemoration, a phenomenon not unique to Israel but shared by many nations across the globe.