memory is “ways in which people construct a sense of the past”

Benedict Anderson rightly described nations as ‘imagined communities’. They have boundaries and resources but are also held together by selective memories of great battles and heroes—and the equally careful forgetting of uncomfortable facts—woven into useful myths that provide a simplified map of the past into which we can insert ourselves, a

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The specifics of Freud’s reconstruction have not found much favor with Egyptologists, but his arguments about memory and history have been very influential. Freud suggested that, much like individuals who have suffered trauma, societies repress the memory of horrific events in their past because these are too painful to confront or document

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