Investigates the dynamic relationship between experiences of profound social and cultural disruption, and human memory. Critical comparisons are made across a wide variety of catastrophic experiences and memories; not just of war, but also of massacre, genocide, rebellion, famine, partition, shipwreck and fire.

List of Contributors1. Introduction – Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver2. Remembering the English Civil War – Mark Stoyle3. ‘Diabolical design’: Charleston elites, the 1822 slave insurrection and the discourse of the supernatural – P. A. Cramer4. Memory and the commemoration of the Great Irish Famine – Peter Gray5. ‘The greatest and the worst’: Dominant and subaltern memories of the Dos Bocas well fire of 1908 – Glen D. Kuecker6. The Titanic and the commodification of catastrophe – James Guimond7. Doctors and trauma in World War One: The response of British military psychiatrists – Edgar Jones8. Commemorations of the siege of Leningrad: A catastrophe in memory and myth – Lisa A. Kirschenbaum9. The missing camps of Aktion Reinhard: The judicial displacement of a mass murder – Donald Bloxham10. Memory and authenticity: The case of Binjamin Wilkomirski – Andrea Reiter11. Partition memory and multiple identities in the Champaran district of Bihar, India – Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff12. Bodies do count: American nurses mourn the catastrophe of Vietnam – Carol Acton13. ‘Not much of a place anymore’: The reception and memory of the massacre at My Lai – Kendrick Oliver14. Remembering Vukovar, forgetting Vukovar: Constructing national identity through the memory of catastrophe in Croatia – Rose Lindsey15. Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Sawoniuk? British memory of the Holocaust and Kosovo, Spring 1999 – Tony Kushner

Investigates the dynamic relationship between experiences of profound social and cultural disruption, and human memory. Critical comparisons are made across a wide variety of catastrophic experiences and memories; not just of war, but also of massacre, genocide, rebellion, famine, partition, shipwreck and fire. The book is an accessible showcase for a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of memory, including literary studies, cultural studies, participant-observation and historical studies, and uses a variety of oral, visual and written sources. Offers a diverse chronological and geographical range of catastrophic cases, from seventeenth-century England to the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, from Ireland to the Indian sub-continent, from Mexico to wartime Leningrad. Well-written and accessible – a fascinating read.