The shadow of the civil war: A historiography of civil war memory

The memory of the Civil War has become one of the most vibrant and contested subjects in nineteenth-century American history over the past two decades. Studies of Civil War memory potentially can reveal much about the cultural, political, and intellectual world of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Whereas the Civil War has often been studied in historical isolation, histories of memory thrust off the standard constraints of periodization to emphatically link the Civil War with late nineteenthcentury history. David W Blight's award-winning synthesis Race and Reunion (2001) both indicates the topic's rapid maturation and heightens the need for a historiographical excursion to assess the collective strengths and weaknesses of this burgeoning subfield. The following essay explores the convergence of factors, both within and outside of the historical profession, which have encouraged the boom in memory studies. In addition, it traces the emerging historiography to examine both the creative diversity of the field as well as its common assumptions, insights, and strategic limits.     

Civil War heritage as American diplomacy, 1957–1965

This paper explores the role of Civil War heritage in U.S. public diplomacy during the Cold War era. Especially during the celebration of the Civil War’s centennial, between 1961 and 1965, the Americans endeavoured to harness the conflict’s heritage to promote U.S. interests in Europe. How they intended to do this is demonstrated primarily through an examination of Colonel Sidney Morgan’s mission to Europe to find how the commemoration of the Civil War could be used for public diplomacy. Additionally, by exploring how Civil War heritage was spread and used in the British public sphere, the paper examines and underlines the key role saved to unofficial cultural agents, such as Civil War re-enactment clubs and private people, in heritage diplomacy. The focus on unofficial agents and networks enable this study to show how heritage diplomacy works at the un-institutionalised level and to explore the interaction between the official and unofficial level in heritage diplomacy. The historical perspective and methodology cast new light on the use of history, historical memory and heritage for diplomatic ends and introduces both historians and heritage scholars with new avenues to explore, such as the role of memory and historical consciousness in shaping international relations.     

美国史学界关于内战记忆研究述评

书写内战史有助于美国人内战记忆的形成,记忆的调整又推动着内战叙事的演变。通过南部老兵与妇女的努力,“失去的事业”从一种地方记忆上升为民族记忆。从20世纪开始,这种南部记忆主导了美国史学界对内战史的书写。直到越战后期,学界才从社会文化与政治需要的角度剖析“失去的事业”记忆的兴起及其影响,其研究对象主要为群体记忆、英雄记忆,以战场旧址、军事公墓及其纪念碑为中心的有形记忆场。因服务于国家重聚与民族和解之需,存在多种面相的“联邦事业”记忆被美国人长时期遗忘。直到20世纪80年代末,为突出黑人对美国历史的贡献,学界开始重新评析这一强调联邦统一与解放黑人的内战记忆。总之,美国学界对内战记忆的探究总体遵循“失去的事业”与“联邦事业”这两种叙事路径,但其研究并未完全摆脱意识形态的干扰。从21世纪开始,内战记忆史的研究逐步走向了多元社会化的发展方向。     

Between Defeat and Victory: Finnish memory culture of the Second World War

The article focuses on five essential phenomena in the Finnish memory culture relating to the three Finnish wars fought in 1939–1945, namely, (1) the memory of the fallen; (2) the influential work by author Väinö Linna; (3) the contested memory politics and veteran cultures in the 1960s and 1970s; (4) Germany and the Holocaust in the Finnish memory culture; and (5) the ‘neo-patriotic’ turn in the commemoration of the wars from the end of the 1980s onwards. The Finnish memory culture of 1939–1945 presents an interesting case of how the de facto lost wars against the Soviet Union have been shaped into cornerstones of national history and identity that continue to play a significant role even today. Using the growing research literature on the various aspects of the Finnish war memories and memory politics, the article aims, first, at outlining a synthesis of the memory culture's central features and, second, at challenging the common contemporary conception, according to which the Finnish war veterans would have been forgotten, neglected and even disgraced during the post-war decades, to be ‘rehabilitated’ only from the end of the 1980s onwards.     

PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE WAYS OF MEMORY AND HISTORY

Philosopher Jeffrey Barash seeks to clarify the concept of collective memory, which has taken on wide‐ranging meanings in contemporary scholarship. Returning to the original insight of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs during the 1920s, he grounds the concept in the living social memory of the present, whose sphere is widened by its capacity to draw upon a past beyond its ken through the symbolization of its remembrance. He offers two preliminary propositions: first, there is a history to the way philosophers have contextualized collective memory through the ages; second, there is a politics in the transmission of collective memory, highly visible in the uses of memory by mass media in the contemporary age. He builds his argument around four interrelated interpretations concerning: the ever more circumscribed role attributed to collective memory in the passage from antiquity into modernity; the dependence of collective memory upon living memory; the rising power of media to mold collective memory to present purposes; and historical understanding vis‐à‐vis evocation of collective memory as oppositional ways of accessing the past. I close with commentary that places Barash's philosophical interpretation within the context of contemporary historiographical practice, with particular attention to the scholarship of French historian Pierre Nora on the French national memory, and that of German scholars Jan and Aleida Assmann on the preservation and transmission of memorable cultural legacies.     

On the shock of civil war: cultural trauma and national identity in Finland and Ireland

What role does national identity play after civil war? Is reconstruction possible on the basis of an existing identity, or does a new identity have to be found? Much depends on whether narratives of conflict are unifying. I use the tools of cultural sociology to explain why the Finnish Civil War of 1918 has become a unifying ‘cultural trauma’ for the Finns, whereas the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 never became the dominant referent in Irish national identity. The difference is explained by the greater shock civil war posed to Finnish national identity.     

Musical memory,heritage and local identity: remembering the popular music past in a European Capital of Culture

This paper explores the relationship between rock music, collective memory and local identity, by focusing on events connected to Liverpool's status as European Capital of Culture 2008. The first part of the paper describes these events and how memories of local rock music were attached to heritage and local identity and mobilised to validate Liverpool as a capital of culture, whilst in turn the city's Capital of Culture status served to validate particular ways of remembering the local musical past. The second part of the paper considers the broader significance of these events by relating them to three pan-European trends in cultural policy: the development of the cultural and heritage industries; the protection and promotion of local culture and identity; and the fostering of cultural diversity and integration. It highlights the general significance of the popular music past for cultural policy in Europe, but also the politics of popular music memory and how it involves a complex and dynamic process of negotiation that relates to cultural policy in particular ways. The paper concludes by arguing that popular music offers a specific and productive focus for research on cultural policy, heritage and local identity in Europe.     

From ‘flight and expulsion’ to migration: contextualizing German victims of forced migration

Abstract

The forced migration of twelve million Germans was central to German memory after 1945, and reflects fundamental changes in remembering the Second World War, that is, refocusing from German victims, such as expellees, to the victims of Germany in the Holocaust. Within this discourse, ‘flight and expulsion’ demonstrates Germany’s entangledness with her eastern neighbours and is turned into a European and transnational mnemonic discourse with the debates over a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ in the 2000s. This article studies ‘flight and expulsion’ between two mnemonic patterns, that is, the loss of the homeland against migration. After the collective imagination of a lost homeland in the east, the emerging Holocaust memory both marginalized ‘flight and expulsion’ in the late 1970s and introduced new patterns of commemoration. These patterns enabled a turn toward individual victimhood and the decontextualization of ‘flight and expulsion’ from the Second World War. The ‘Centre against Expulsions’ project demonstrates the coordination of the German example with other cases of forced migration and the claim for a universal commemoration of past expulsion and the condemnation of any future attempts. The case of Syrian civil-war refugees, however, reveals that such forms of decontextualization only in part transfer into humanitarian imperatives.     

Ahvola 1918: Archaeological Reconnaissance of a Finnish Civil War Battlefield

Abstract

The Finnish Civil War (1918) has received very little attention from the archaeologists until recently. This paper describes the first archaeological investigation of a Civil War battlefield in the Karelian Isthmus, nowadays northwest Russia. The battlefield of Ahvola, which saw one of the decisive battles of the war, was surveyed briefly in November 2007. With relatively little subsequent landuse, the general landscape has remained roughly similar to that of the early twentieth century, and the remains of field fortifications have been preserved unexpectedly well. Thus the fields of Ahvola hold high potential for more widespread archaeological studies in future. The present survey, along with two earlier surveys of Finnish Civil War battlefields, provides important base data for future research on the subject.     

Guerra civile: experience,memory and contrasting histories of the Resistance in Italy

This article examines the disagreement between two partisans turned historians, Nuto Revelli and Claudio Pavone, on the legitimacy of the term ‘civil war’ to describe the Italian Resistance of 1943–1945. ‘Civil war’ is a controversial term in Italian and European discussions of World War II. Accordingly, ‘civil war’ provokes a study of the intersection of ideology and ethics, experiential memory and history in postwar Europe. But why should Revelli and Pavone, two men who had been on the same side during the Resistance, see things so differently? This article demonstrates that each historian’s experience before and during World War II shaped their participation in the Resistance and their subsequent representation of it. Consequently, their divergent experiences offer an explanation as to why Pavone argues that the Resistance was a civil war and Revelli argues that it was not, without relativizing in political and ethical analysis.     

Dwelling Brothers,Oozing Oil,and Descending Dew: Reading Psalm 133 Through the Lens of Yehudite Social Memory

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which Psalm 133 contributes to and is shaped by social memory in Yehud. By reading this psalm as a voice within a larger discourse of cultural memories, the images of brothers dwell-ing together, flowing oil, and dew can be understood to fit within a standard narrative structure according to which the Yehudite community fashioned its stories, highlighting a sense of continuity between Israel’s perceived golden age and its anticipated utopian future. In this paper, I argue that through the collective reliving of shared memories, the community was able to virtually participate in the glorious existence that it perceived to be due to it as YHWH’s chosen people, contributing to a sense of collective identity.     

Frontier Landscape – Lapland in the Tradition of Finnish Landscape Painting

Abstract

Finnish artists depicted Lapland as a frontier. The position of the Lappish landscape as a part of the Finnish landscape painting tradition is explored through a framework based on art and cultural history as well as humanistic and cultural geography. Paintings from three historical periods are analyzed: the early and later period of Finland as an autonomous Russian Grand Duchy (1809–1917), the first decades after the independence of Finland (1917–1939) and the Second World War (1939–1945). Lapland is today the borderline of leisure and work and the frontier of Finnish and Sámi cultures. Earlier Lappish landscapes were places of Sámi nomadism and Finnish farming, which can be seen in the Lappish landscape paintings from the 1890s to 1920s. Finnish art tradition, however, was not ready to accept Lapland, the northern frontier, as a part of Finland. During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s the meaning of the northern borderline grew and Lapponism, the golden years of Lappish landscape and tourism, began. During the Lapponism period there were few paintings depicting Sámi culture, because the Sámi were thought to be primitive or Mongolian, and were not accepted as part of Finnish culture.     

国外人文地理学关于记忆研究的进展与启示

记忆是当前西方人文社会科学的一个重要概念。记忆是与时间和空间密不可分的,空间是承载记忆的容器。二战以来,西方社会文化史家从时间的角度对记忆进行了大量研究。21世纪以来,关于记忆的研究也日益成为西方人文地理学者关注的领域。本文是对国外(主要是欧美)人文地理学者关于记忆研究的文献回顾,文章首先对记忆的相关概念进行阐释,然后从研究方法和研究主题的角度探讨了国外记忆地理的研究进展,探讨了国外人文地理学者关于记忆的研究内容以及对国内研究的借鉴与启示。总体来看,地理学的记忆研究还未形成固定的范式,研究的内容和方法体系都有待进一步完善。     

Spanish Civil War caves of Asturias in archaeology and memory

As the Spanish Civil War drew to a close, retreating Republican troops in the northern region of Asturias took refuge in caves in the mountains from the brutal victor’s justice of the Francoist forces. In this paper we examine three of these caves in the context of the Civil War experiences of the rural municipality of Santo Adriano, based on a combination of archaeological recording and oral history interviews. The paper focuses on the role of the La Ponte-Ecomuseum, a grassroots heritage organisation that has worked to preserve and communicate the tangible and intangible heritage of the district. The Civil War heritage presents cultural, political and practical challenges for the museum: nonetheless it has succeeded in establishing an ongoing programme for its communication and protection.     

Human rights politics and scaled performances of memory: conflicts among the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina

This paper builds on the geographies of commemoration literature extending the scope of inquiry to consider the scaled performances through which the politics of memory unfold. I focus on an analysis of conflicts over the creation of memorial landscapes that emerge from the intricate ways in which representations of the past and the everyday politics of social movements intersect. The paper analyses the competing politics of memory of two groups of Madres de Plaza de Mayo (mothers of people who ‘disappeared’ during Argentina's Dirty War). Their strategies underscore geographic dimensions of the politics of memory as the Madres clash over how to appropriately place memory in the landscape. While one group emphasizes making visible the events of the past to promote transmission of memory and to remember those who disappeared, the other group focuses on re‐interpreting symbols about the past in an attempt to encourage future activism. Such conflicting strategies manifest spatially in a variety of ways, ranging from the creation of physical markers in the built environment to the performance of collective rituals that centre on activists' bodies as sites for either commemoration of the past or future activism. The Madres' conflicts highlight how different spatialities contribute to validate or condemn competing politics of commemoration.     

Omsorg om livet. Spädbarnsdödlighetens förändring i Ådalen under 1800-talet [Caring about life. Infant mortality in Ådalen,Sweden, during the 19th century]

The Finnish forest workers' trade union and employers' organizations signed their first wage agreement in 1957 and first collective labour agreement in 1962. Many other sectors had concluded such agreements years earlier. This article challenges the widely accepted idea that collective labour agreements were becoming ubiquitous in Finnish industrial relations soon after the Second World War. Forest workers were left out of this process, and up until the late 1950s their wages and working conditions were not determined by the labour market parties but by state authorities – the state legislated and regulated forestry wages. The explanation for the delayed development of labour market practices in this sector can be found in forest work itself as well as the state's active role. This work was, up until the 1960s, done mainly by small farmers who were reluctant to unionize and unable to otherwise promote their interests. The situation changed when professionalization made them more or less full-time forest workers who more often joined the union. At the same time, the state created organizations and institutions which encouraged labour market parties to cooperate. Their shared struggle against political interference pushed labour market parties towards collective bargaining.     

Corporations and commemoration: first world war remembrance,Lloyds TSB and the national memorial arboretum

This paper explores the role of corporations and financial organisations in maintaining a memory of employees who have served during the wars of the 20th century. Focusing initially on memorial schemes devised by finance houses in the commemorative era after the Great War, the paper examines the emergence of a broader approach to organisational memory and the social construction of collective memory. Taking the Lloyds TSB finance group as a case study, the origins of the company’s war memorial in central London are examined, and the recent attempts to re‐locate a number of memorial objects and icons accumulated during the expansion of the group. This case study indicates how the social memory of an organisation might be understood through an appraisal of the monumental furniture that lives, often invisibly, within an organisation. The paper concludes with a number of questions concerning the nature of organisational memory when confronted with a history of merger and acquisition, and the difficulties in finding a commemorative site able to represent and safeguard these histories.     

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN COLLECTIVE OCCUPATIONAL PENSIONS IN BUSINESS IN SCANDINAVIA,CA. 1900–1930

The first three decades of the 20th century marked the beginning of modern collective occupational pensions for salaried business employees in the three Scandinavian countries. Pension premiums were derived from actuarial principles and pension entitlement was financially and legally secured. Relatively few salaried business employees were covered by these new occupational pension schemes until the 1930s. There were similar developments as well as different outcomes in the three countries. In their first three decades, the relative success of such schemes, and the participation of salaried employees in them, seems to have been largest in Denmark and lowest – as well as starting latest – in Norway. The development of occupational pensions in business is compared with Britain and Switzerland as well as with occupational pensions for public employees in the Scandinavian countries; the latter clearly functioning as a model. The new principles for occupational pensions in business, established during and after World War I, proved long lasting and increasingly important. In Norway, defined benefit pension schemes that started in business during World War I were not replaced by defined contribution pension schemes until after 2000.     

The Swedish journal Morgonbris on political violence in Finland 1917–1918

Women participated actively in the Finnish Civil War in January 1918–April 1918. The radicalization of the Finnish Social Democratic Party and the embracing of a revolutionary discourse sent tremors also to Sweden. In this article, I investigate how the Swedish Social Democratic women’s journal Morgonbris addresses women’s political violence in the period surrounding the Russian Revolution in March 1917, the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover and the following Civil War in Finland early 1918.

Morgonbris did not shun from reporting or debating women’s political violence, however, as this article shows there is a great discrepancy between how different acts of violence are understood in the greater discourse. Some violence, and especially some acts of violence committed by women, is clearly framed as more legitimate than others.     

The cultural biography of a Western Australian war memorial

In common with other western countries, there is resurgence in war commemoration in Australia indicating a serious pursuit of identity and a national story on a collective and personal level. A widespread academic and popular interest in war memory and material culture such as war memorials has emerged. War memorials often find their way on to heritage registers. This paper advances cultural biography as an approach to determine the significance of war memorials arguing that this may give a deeper understanding of its community meaning than present methods. Emerging in archaeology cultural biography considers the way that social interactions between people and objects over time create meaning. Using the Katanning war memorial statue in Western Australia as a case study, this paper argues that a cultural biographical approach may uncover a deeper cultural significance resulting from a focus on relationships than from the traditional focus on the memorial as object.