memory 
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6/25/2023
Martha Hodes Talks "My Hijacking" with HNN
by Michan Connor
In 1970, when she was 12, Martha Hodes was held hostage for nearly a week in a campaign of airline hijacking that captured world attention. She discusses trauma and erasure in the historical record, the roles of remembering and forgetting in shaping views of the past, and how she investigated herself as a historial actor.
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SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
6/12/2023
Martha Hodes Turns Historian's Training to Reach Memory Hidden by Trauma
A memoirist of her own experience of terrorist hostage-taking reviews Martha Hodes's effort to apply the tools of historians to recover memory of being held in the Jordanian desert on a hijacked plane in 1970.
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SOURCE: American Historical Review
9/19/2022
"As if I Wasn't There": Writing from a Child's Memory
by Martha Hodes
Writing her own memory of being held hostage by terrorists forced the author to put herself at the center of the story.
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8/23/2020
"Hamilton" as a Meditation on History and Memory
by Bennett Parten
In a moment in which Confederate monuments are finally coming down and we are re-thinking how we tell our history, Hamilton is a sign of hope. It’s a sign that while history is something we can never resign from, we can always enter the narrative and, like Eliza, construct a history of our own.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
1/29/19
Texas Republicans criticized for their Holocaust Remembrance Day message: ‘Leftism kills’
The Anti-Defamation League criticized the Facebook post on Sunday and countered more vehemently on Monday the local GOP’s attempts to tie the Holocaust to leftism.
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SOURCE: CNN
1/27/19
Ignorance about the Holocaust is growing
As awareness of the Holocaust declines, we have witnessed, perhaps not coincidentally, a surge in anti-Semitic attacks
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SOURCE: Guardian
3-2-16
The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good
by David Rieff
Why we are wrong to believe we should remember the past.
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SOURCE: PSYBLOG
1-22-16
Human Memory Capacity is Ten Times More Than Previously Thought
A human brain could hold as much information as the entire internet, a new study finds.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
9-3-15
The politics of public memory, from Watergate to Iraq
by Nick Enfield
Michael Schudson’s book, Watergate in American Memory, is a masterly study of how versions of events can become facts. The Watergate case study shows brilliantly that while facts are important, so are our interpretations and portrayals of those facts.
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11-27-14
Study on Cultural Memory Confirms: Chester A. Arthur, We Hardly Knew Ye
Quick: Which American president served before slavery ended, John Tyler or Rutherford B. Hayes?
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The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis
by Paul A. Cohen
Why do human beings from diverse cultures around the world prefer memory to history?
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2-1-15
The Surprising Reason We Have a Memory
by Michio Kaku
It's not to remember the past, but to know the future.
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SOURCE: NY Review of Books
5-22-14
How Memory Speaks
by Jerome Groopman
The role of memory in virtually every activity of our day is put in sharp focus when it is lost.
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SOURCE: PsyBlog
3-5-14
Quirks of Memory Everyone Should Know
by Jeremy Dean
Why we remember and why we forget.
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How Memory Works: Interview with Psychologist Daniel L. Schacter
by Robin Lindley
Image via Shutterstock.Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.--Albert EinsteinMemory is the stuff of history. Historians rely on the memories of individuals as they seek and discover the facts and stories from which we create our public memory. Thus, knowledge from a scientific perspective of how human memory works can be instructive to historians.
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SOURCE: Salon
3-16-13
Tracy Thompson: The South Still Lies About the Civil War
Tracy Thompson is the author of "The New Mind of the South." This excerpt comes from a longer excerpt of her book posted at Salon.In the course of our conversation, Yacine Kout mentioned something else—an incident that had happened the previous spring at Eastern Randolph High School just outside Asheboro. On Cinco de Mayo, the annual celebration of Mexico’s defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, a lot of Hispanic students brought Mexican flags to school. The next day, Kout said, white students brought Confederate flags to school as a message: This is our heritage.
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SOURCE: NYT
1-29-13
Ex-Dictator Is Ordered to Trial in Guatemalan War Crimes Case
MEXICO CITY — A Guatemalan judge on Monday ordered Efraín Rios Montt, the former dictator, and his intelligence chief to stand trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in connection with the massacres of villagers in remote highlands three decades ago.The ruling clears the way for a public trial for Mr. Rios Montt, a former general who ruled Guatemala for 17 months in 1982 and 1983 during the bloodiest period of the country’s long-running civil war. It is a stunning decision for Guatemala, where the military still wields significant power behind the scenes and the country’s elected governments have struggled to build democratic institutions....