Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.

Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

The nature of public space in contemporary society is changing. This paper uses the turmoil over People's Park in Berkeley, California, as a means for exploring changing ideas about and practices in public space. I argue that as public space is increasingly privatized or otherwise brought under greater control, possibilities for democratic action are minimized. To make this claim, I provide a brief outline of the roots of the August 1991 riots at People's Park. I then examine the role that public space plays in modern democracies, and how ideas about public space have developed dialectically with definitions of who counts as “the public.” In American democracy, “the public” is constituted by private individuals. In this paper, I suggest that the presence of homeless people in public spaces raises important contradictions at the heart of this definition of “the public.” Many commentators suggest that these contradictions have led to “the end of public space” in contemporary cities, or at the very ...

/pdf/the-end-of-public-space-people-s-park-definitions-of-the-5efcwv85us.pdf

The End of Public Space?People's Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2958224/why%20do%20the%20poor%20live%20in%20cities.pdf?sequence=2

Why do the poor live in cities? The role of public transportation ✩

This chapter represents an attempt to integrate a widely disparate literature concerning factors which play a role in the etiology of sex offending and lead to its persistence. In particular we are concerned that most researchers seem to take a rather narrow perspective of this behavior, stressing their own preferred processes (i.e., psychological, biological, or sociological) to the virtual exclusion of others. We have previously emphasized the role of learning experiences (Marshall and Barbaree, 1984a), sociocultural factors (Marshall, 1984a), and biological processes (Marshall 1984b) in the etiology of rape, but this represents our first attempt at integration and the first time we have extended our theorizing to account for other sex offenses. We believe that a proper understanding of sex offending can only be attained when these diverse processes are seen as functionally interdependent.

An Integrated Theory of the Etiology of Sexual Offending

Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations—notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid—play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, I argue, are reproduced through various enactments. While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.

https://people.uwec.edu/ivogeler/w270/property-violence.pdf

Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid

To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, racoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today it is the city of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In "Gotham", Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history,on ethat ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heoghts, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial centre, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands - the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich village from the city's grid street plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who hapily celebrated that same life. We meet Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greely; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels"(who revolutionised the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerise everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth.

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Introduction: Battlefields of Memory Section I 1. Visiting the Past: History Museums in the United States 2. Razor Ribbons, History Museums, and Civic Salvation 3. Boat People: Immigrant History at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island 4. Progress Talk: Museums of Science, Technology, and Industry 5. Industrial Museums and the History of Deindustrialization 6. The Virtual Past: Media and History Museums 7. Museums and Controversy Section II 8. Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World 9. Disney's America Section III 10. Preserving the Past: A History of Historic Preservation 11. Preservation Revisited Section IV 12. Ronald Reagan and the Politics of History 13. The Battle of the Enola Gay

Mike Wallace

Papers

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Mickey Mouse history and other essays on American memory

Visiting the Past: History Museums in the United States

Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World

American violence; a documentary history