The Titanic story is an excellent subject for commodification because of its huge cast of heroes and victims who can be contrasted with its villains. Commodification thrives on familiarity, and the Titanic story is a prime example of one of the most popular narrative genres, the disaster story. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 has assumed the status of an iconic disaster. From the immediate aftermath of the event to the present, it has been made to carry symbolic and metaphorical meanings, often embodied in forms of cultural commodification. This chapter analyses several cinematic representations of the disaster as snapshots of changing cultural contexts and dramatic appropriations of collective memory. The sinking of the Titanic might be considered good public relations for plutocracy, since it demonstrated that millionaires could die as unselfishly as members of the other classes, thus showing that conspicuous consumption could be accompanied by conspicuous heroism.

This chapter discusses the impact of the My Lai massacre of 1968 on American consciousness. It examines public reactions from the initial revelation of the massacre to the end of the court martial of Lieutenant William Calley - one of the key perpetrators. The chapter traces the interplay of institutional, social, and cultural forces which led to the erasure of the victims' perspectives from the national debate, allowing a point of apparent 'closure' to be reached. Although American debates about the massacre at My Lai were impassioned and inclusive of much of the national community, they were not sufficient to force the country to conscience. Even as the massacre dominated public discourse within the United States, the sufferings of the victims became neutralised as a source of national anxiety and remorse.

In 1995 a cycle of commemorative activities to memorialise the Great Irish Famine of 1845-50 was initiated in Ireland, North America, Great Britain, and Australia. This chapter focuses on two points, both reflecting the preoccupations of a professional historian who is also engaged with the political contestations for which the Great Irish Famine stands as a metaphor. One focus is on the history of Famine 'memory' over the intervening century and a half; the second on the validity of the truth claims made about the Famine as part of the process of commemoration and the rhetorical forms through which these are articulated. The author employs the theoretical insights of Pierre Nora, and discusses the role of the historian in critiquing or contributing to a process that appears to lie more in the realm of heritage than of academic history.

The most private writing of women who nursed in the Vietnam War is their poetry, most of which remained unpublished until veteran nurse Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey edited the anthology Visions of War, Dreams of Peace in 1992. This chapter discusses the parallel experiences of female American nurses in and after the Vietnam War, and how they sought to disrupt official attempts at rationalising and regulating grief, through their memoirs and poetry. While Van Devanter's publication of her war experience and its traumatic aftermath gave many of the returned women veterans permission to speak publicly of their own experiences, the primary sanctioning of these war memories came with the placing of the women's memorial in the context of the other sites of Vietnam commemoration, after years of lobbying by the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project.

The nearly 900-day siege of Leningrad that began in September 1941 immediately became mythologised. Understood as a 'historic event' even as it occurred, the siege rapidly became the subject of commemorations. The drama and tragedy of the nearly two million Leningraders trapped by the blockade easily lent itself to myth making. For nearly three years, Leningraders endured sufferings that defy the imagination. This chapter describes how, during the horrific siege of Leningrad in 1941-44, women workers at the city's library self-consciously accumulated an archival record of popular experience, intertwining the public narratives and private memories of the event. Though the end of the war witnessed the reimposition of more overt state control over memorial space, the author stresses the importance of active memory-work as a survival strategy in appalling circumstances, and as a legacy to future generations.

Over 350 years after the Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century finally came to an end, they continue to exert a tenacious grip on the English historical imagination. This chapter traces how recalling the 'double catastrophe' of the English Civil Wars was first politically contested and subsequently embedded in English linguistic and folkloric forms which long outlived the traumatised participants in the conflict. The 'Royalist party' of the 1640s gradually transmogrified itself into the 'Tory party' of the 1700s, while the 'Parliamentarian party' of the 1640s transformed itself into the 'Oliverian party' of the 1660s, and later still into the 'Whig party' of the 1700s. As a result, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell remained powerful political icons even after all those who had lived through the Civil Wars were dead. The chapter explores the different ways in which these two pivotal figures of the 1640s were remembered in English folklore.

This chapter concerns the establishment of a representation - or more precisely a nonrepresentation - of the 'Holocaust'. The historical context is the crucible of the immediate post-war world, and specifically the Allied trials of Nazi criminals. It traces how the predominant Anglo-American cultural memory of the Holocaust was formed by the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1945-46. While seeking to reconstruct German society and to punish guilty leaders, the prosecutors employed investigatory techniques and analytical categories that tended to downplay the Jewish ethnicity of the victims, and to erase from the record the Aktion Reinhard extermination camps in the east. The chapter illustrates, with reference to a case study concerning nearly one-third of the Jews murdered during the Second World War, the role of the war crimes trials in the refraction of the history and memory of the Nazi years.

At the juncture of British withdrawal in 1947, British India was divided into two states: India and (East and West) Pakistan. This division is commonly referred to as the 'Partition'. This chapter concerns the ways in which the Partition narratives of Bengal came to foreground one identity in place of another. It provides an analysis of the place of Bengali refugees in the Champaran district of Bihar. The chapter examines the three stages of Partition experience narrated by these refugees: their lives before they crossed the international border between newly created India and East Pakistan; their lives after they had fled from their birthplaces and received 'shelter' in one of the refugee camps normally located in West Bengal in India; and, their memories of Partition after they arrived in Bihar and were resettled by the government in so-called refugee colonies.

This book explores the themes of catastrophe, memory, and trauma through a chronologically ordered series of historical case studies. Inevitably, given the multifaceted character of these themes, the authors - historians, sociologists, and literary critics - deploy a variety of methodologies appropriate to their study. It presents longitudinal surveys, particularly developed in two essays tracing the shifting patterns of the memory of pre-twentieth-century catastrophes: the mid-seventeenth-century English Civil Wars, and the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. In modern society, memory is suffused with conceptions of authenticity and authority; yet, it can be, and frequently is, also commodified and rendered into the forms of popular culture and mass entertainment. The book also addresses the political instrumentalisation of memory in relation to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.

This chapter examines how the Dos Bocas well fire was a catastrophe, an experience that signified to locals a disruption in the course of their lives. It explores how locals and nationals gave meaning to that disruption, and how their understandings of the fire produced distinct proto-memories of the event. The chapter illustrates how one proto-memory became dominant, and how it subsumed the alternative narrative. The dominant proto-memory was constructed by national actors, journalists, federal government officials, and scientists. The chapter explores how memory became part of the hegemonic discourse about the place of oil in Mexican modernity and shows how 'official' memory was contested by a subaltern survival of local identity and memory. Finally, it offers considerations of what the Dos Bocas catastrophe tells us about the great changes taking place in Mexico today under the influence of neoliberal reforms.

This chapter draws on recently completed fieldwork in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to examine the place that the fall of the town of Vukovar in 1991 held in the Croatian national consciousness. It argues that Croatia's right-wing government was using the memory of the fall of Vukovar to construct a Croatian national identity that was framed around its heroic suffering and victim status during the recent conflicts. Drawing on personal observations, and on local and international media reportage of events in Croatia, the chapter takes into account these later developments and examines the mutations of Croatian collective memories of the conflicts between 1993 and 2002. It describes the political usage by the Franjo Tudman regime of the memory of the 1991 fall of Vukovar in the construction of a Croatian national myth, and the subsequent disintegration of that official version in the wake of the regime change in 2000.

Baudrillard dismissed the 1990s in advance of that decade. Summoning an early ‘end of the century party’, Steve Redhead uses this absence and avoidance to retheorise rock and pop history, offering a more complex genealogy and trajectory.