In the aftermath of the war, a new form of commemoration and memorialization took place, centered around the adoption of fatherless children as a substitute to the loss of a son. French orphans were part of a process merging remembrance and humanitarian action. In vast cemeteries across France, the sacrifice of American soldiers was honored on special occasions, with the sponsored orphans and school children placing wreaths of flowers on their tombs. In parallel, the FCFS launched another campaign of sponsorships to reduce infant mortality. With its local branches across the United States, the FCFS capitalized on its ability to reach out to local communities and thus staved off the indifference that can set in after a crisis has seemed to pass. With its other communication strategies still in place, the FCFS saw continued success, testament to its deep popularity across the United States. Between the end of 1918 and 1921, the response of the United States was such that the number of sponsored orphans increased from 80,000 to 300,000.

Philanthropic organizations generally operate through networks of political and social élites, mobilizing the wealthy and influential. That was no less true during World War I. The colonies established by the CFAPCF were under the direct patronage of wealthy individuals – Americans who donated parts of their fortune and lent their properties to care for and house relatively small groups of children who were victims of the war: ill, injured, or displaced. The FCFS, which provided money directly to war widows caring for their fatherless children, marshaled the empathy and energies of the American public – initially expatriate Americans in France but eventually wide cross-sections of American society – to support some 300,000 children.

The Conclusion summarizes the main findings in the book. It also explains how the research process interrupted the researcher’s expectations and enabled a more complex discourse to emerge. The Conclusion provides an engagement with Iranian modernist art less through the concept of history and more through the concept of memorialization. This helps again identify the weak points of Iranian art historiography and its apparent transparency.

A cornerstone text of England’s Reformation, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is deeply concerned with constructs of cultural memory and the use of that memory to steel the resolve of English Protestants to continue the hard work of reforming the church. First published in 1563 and borrowing from hagiographical traditions, Acts and Monuments attempts to legitimize the English Reformation by placing it in the continuum of early Christian persecutions and martyrdoms, and by further vilifying Catholics at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign following the Marian counter-Reformation. This chapter situates Foxe’s work in the context of cultural memorialization and traumatic historiography – that is, the construction and reiteration of cultural trauma through historic documentation/commemoration.

An account of the final sixteen years of Eduard’s life, plus the nature of the posthumous reputation of other members of the Strauss dynasty, including the musical ambition of Eduard’s elder son, Johann Maria Eduard Strauss. Eduard’s memoirs are discussed, as well as the melodramatic destruction of the performance library of the Strauss Orchestra. His final illness and death ran in counterpoint with that of the emperor, Franz Joseph.

This chapter highlights the central role that burial grounds play in the construction of diasporic memory and collective identity through a visual ethnography of tombstones located in several Islamic burial grounds across Western Europe. In spite of the long-term settlement of Muslim communities, such spaces are extremely rare and suffused with deep cultural meaning. Displays of belonging through epitaphs, images, and grave design are strategies to demonstrate connections to various collectivities. As places where the physical landscape is symbolically inscribed and signified, Islamic burial grounds in Europe offer insight into the changing contours of membership and identity in contemporary multicultural societies.

This chapter argues that the interest Middleton shows in the levelling power of mortality in A Game at Chess reveals a consistent attitude towards fame and the eternizing powers of theatre. Rather than transcending the cultural practices and preoccupations of his own time, Middleton’s works in general and A Game at Chess in particular demonstrate an insistent effort to immerse themselves within them. Instead of setting the play apart from the plays for which he is best known, Middleton furnishes A Game at Chess with similar theatrical and thematic interests, many of which bring issues involving memorialization to the surface. While the allegorical surface of the play seems to indulge the eternizing designs of the White House, the more theatrically compelling characters of the Black House, like the moving monuments they resemble, pursue the approbation of the moment over the possibility of a more enduring legacy. Representing the pursuit of fame as a game, A Game at Chess appears designed to gain Middleton the immediate notoriety of the public stage rather than the eternizing admiration of posterity, even at the cost of the future of his career.

Research has well established that narrative was used prior to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as a tool to construct enemies and facilitate genocidal violence. Political leaders, radio narrators, and newspaper editors especially influenced these narratives through the use of propaganda and dehumanizing language. In light of new research, this chapter asks a different question: What is the role of narratives in the post-genocide construction of victim identity? Through in-depth interviews conducted with 100 Rwandan genocide survivors, former perpetrators, ordinary citizens, and key informants, this chapter finds that people perform their experiences and recall their identities differently in national, local, and private commemorative spaces. Rwandans negotiate between official memorialization and alternative forms of remembering in order to make meaning of their experiences during the genocide. Narrative analysis shows the complicated interplay between the “big story” expressed by the state, and other stories told in different spaces and places. As these stories coincide, coexist, compete, and change over time, they reshape victim identity as complex, dynamic, and dependent on whether victimhood is defined by the law, the state, or individual self-perceptions. The chapter presents broader implications of the multiple relationships between narratives and victim identities for other post-atrocity settings.

As Imperial Germany came into being in 1871, it entered into the consciousness of people who already belonged to an emigrant nation.It contained people who lived far outside that nation-state’s borders, and it included many who considered themselves German plus other things. It was tied together by dynamic forms of communications: ever-more-efficient methods of correspondence, a growing German-language press, not to mention the pedagogical networks that thickened during the last decades of the nineteenth century and ever-more-powerful networks of trade, transport, and travel. The global consciousness that had grown over the previous century now included a consciousness of German communities around the globe and an ever-greater comfort with mobility. That not only extended older forms of labor mobility beyond Europe’s borders but also witnessed an increase in families extending their membership into an ever-greater variety of transcultural places. There were, in fact, millions of Germans living transnational lives in transcultural communities by the end of the century—some in Europe and some far from it.

How is the material world affected by place? How does an urban, suburban, or rural environment shape spaces, the built environment, and the form and use of objects? Why does this matter? This chapter explores siting and location as important factors in understanding the material world. The chapter also addresses the concepts of non-place and repulsive places.

For any discussion of the politics of history evoked thus by typology it is basic to ask how a community – a city, a nation, a sect – curates its memory.

As much debated among Vietnamese nationalists, even the notion of a nation of Vietnam was in tension with a greater Indochina, or what is described here as a “geobody.” Yet this chapter also wonders how memory of the Hong Kong interlude plays out in Vietnam (and Indonesia) today. Ho Chi Minh reconnected with lawyer Frank Loseby after the war, and Loseby (and even Jenkin KC) are honored today in Hanoi as saviors. In addition, British rule of law and independence of the judiciary – as showcased in this book – are seemingly cast in a new and positive light. But if Ho Chi Minh's Hong Kong interlude has been celebrated in books and even movies in Vietnam, memory of Tan Malaka remains far more contested in Indonesia today, notwithstanding his “rehabilitation” in more democratic times as a “father of the Republic.”

In 1870, a literate seamstress, the 19-year-old Lumina Sophie dite Surprise, took part in a short-lived insurrection in southern Martinique. She led a group of female insurrectionists called Pétroleuses who burned down plantations with petrol or gasoline. Subsequently, she was deported to the infamous penitentiary located in French Guyana. In contemporary times, this historical figure famously represents freedom and women’s rights in Martinique. She is remembered by twenty-first century labor activists, feminists, and literary figures and celebrated as the symbol of resistance for the Insurrection of the South.

There is no plausible connection between the genesis of the Greek alphabet and the composition and writing down of the Homeric poems.

Paisley, a Scottish village, here recapitulates the whole story of the Industrial Revolution - its borrowings from Indian textile production, its radical politics and the emerging splits between commerce and manufacturing and between capital and labor. In the nineteenth century, Paisley experienced the next phase as industrialization matured. Its skilled handloom weavers were part of the destruction of the Indian textile industry, as well as one episode of worker unrest that became political activism. How the radical handloom weavers of Paisley were replaced by steam power tells how the larger profession of handloom weaving swelled during industrialization and then disappeared into powered production. When the book ends in the 1840s, industrialization had developed new class structures, and both workers and industrialists used their social class - their relation to the means of production - as the basis for political activism. The concept of invention was itself invented as a buttress to industry’s ideals, which achieved specific political goals when Parliament repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. This accomplishment enshrined an ideology of free trade and a mythology of laissez-faire that accurately described neither the past from which industrialization had sprung nor the imperial nation then coming into being.