Collective memory

This is part of that larger framework we've been talking about.

But in an era when white nationalist nativists in the United States increasingly aligning themselves with global white supremacist political movements, Dr. Bunche's structural attempts, these are structural attempts this man has made, institutional attempts, museums are very important, attempts to integrate these various competing narratives, contested narratives, narratives that will never agree on certain things, but they're narratives ultimately with an aspiration to have some form of collective memory that will never make the United States of America, everybody here, think the same thing, but at least will create space for us to live together, an aspiration which is noble and that I share, I think we all share.

Let us live together.

But it has often inflamed the white nationalist ideologues because they don't want to live together.

But Peyton Manning, they named a street for him outside the stadium, Neyland Stadium, but you never won anything in terms of a national championship, my friend, as a Black quarterback.

But you go and talk to your owner is not gonna do any good, brother, because your owner knows who you are, hence him calling himself and you calling him your owner.

Bunche's structural attempts to integrate these stories, these competive nar- these competing narratives into a collective memory, it often inflates the white na- i- inflames the white nationalists.

They don't want a collective identity unless you get down or lay down.

In each case, the authorities chose a particular mode of power: cavalry, soldiers, or police, and it mattered whether there were legal orders behind the move.

What I'm going to explore is not just the events, but how they became larger symbols in the collective memory.

Peterloo took place on 16 August 1819 amid a post-Napoleonic slump that left many in the industrial north starved and angry.

The Manchester Patriotic Union had gathered some sixty thousand people to demand reform of Parliament and wider suffrage.

In each instance, parliament or executive powers moved in fast fashion to reassert control before any judicial check could take hold.

The lag between action and inquiry became a recurring feature of Britain’s response to unrest.

Media, too, has been a constant but evolving player in shaping collective memory.

In Manchester, the pamphlets of the day carried a mix of reportage and propaganda.

And it's that tension, right? How do we reintegrate loss? How do we move beyond grief? How do we continue to accommodate grief while still being able to articulate it, right? How do we recognize trauma? All of those are kind of like blocks in the road.

And that is part of the reason I would say that collective memory is so strong, because it's by coming together with others.

It's by creating rituals.

It's by knowing what the day is going to look like.

And this notion that we were safe in our homeland and that terrorism was something that occurred abroad, right, that completely switched over.

And so there's no question that though personal loss trumps the picture in so many ways, the collective loss was huge, and it still is huge.

And the interesting thing that we know about collective memory is it doesn't happen immediately.

It usually takes time.

Okay, anyways.

So, well, the other one, which I have the – so collective memory.

So this is where we get into – collective memory shared.

We can't, it's easy to just talk about the stuff like it's just, I mean, it's just ideas, but I mean, these are very, very powerful things.

These are immensely powerful.

Okay.

You know, on, on various levels of that.

So, but you know, so basically, so we have the, collective memory so it's supposed to say so maurice halbosh established the field of collective memory arguing that memory is socially organized it does not exclusively exist in people's minds memory is is you know it goes outside of an individual mind it is stored in it's socially organized, but also you could say it's also existing somehow right in this collective space.

The standard is only as good as the process that maintains it, whether that process is a person checking a database quarterly or an AI checking it daily.

Standards are a form of collective memory.

They encode what an organization or a society has learned about what works.

The diversity of standards ecosystems reflects the diversity of human coordination problems.

Folklore from coastal populations around the Persian Gulf repeatedly references ancient cities swallowed by the sea, prosperous lands that vanished beneath the waves.

survivors who fled inland and founded new settlements these aren't biblical retellings they're indigenous traditions that predate islam and christianity in the region now here's where we need to talk about oral tradition and collective memory Because the standard academic response to flood myths has always been, yes, interesting stories, but they're just myths.

Cultural narratives, not historical records.

And that's true up to a point.