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.

Avoiding the celebration of spectacular consumption, innovative theorisations of postmodernism and popular music provide strategies to move between the binaries of cultural pessimism and cultural optimism.

Springing from the Second Summer of Love, this chapter offers a reconfiguration of youth, drugs and social change. Acid House was not a continuation of youth culture’s history. It was a rip, rupture and disconnection, offering a meta-theorisation of the history of popular music, youth and cultural studies.

Pop must be rendered political. Yet it is available for deep thinking about sex, race, masculinity and femininity. Subcultural style cannot capture this complexity. The New Romantics and Goths confirmed that theories of style required radical reconfigurations. New Order, Factory Records and Tony Wilson offered a playful, irreverent reflection on style history.

Popular music cultures are regulated and policed. Yet as ‘new bohemia’ emerged through the 1990s, the role of independents in the music industry did not continue the legacy of the punks. Instead, a new political economy of pop – activating silence and refusal – offers new trajectories through production and consumption.