The Memory of Catastrophe
Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver review the debate surrounding the commemoration of historical disasters.
The modern era is often cast as an age of catastrophe, of global conflicts, genocides and ‘ethnic cleansings’, disasters of industrial and agrarian change and of technological hubris, and – increasingly – environmental cataclysms. Discussions of the past in the public sphere are currently dominated by debates about the meaning of such events, for the groups that experienced them – as victims, spectators or perpetrators – and for human history in general.
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