| Abstract | This section introduces a series of studies on the politics of collective memory. The field of social or collective memory is a vast one, with individual contributions ranging from biology or neuroscience to the humanities. Consequently, participants from different disciplines concentrate on the topics that appear relevant for their respective fields. First, there are studies that have focused on the ways rituals and practices of commemoration contribute to the construction of specific interpretations of the national past in the present. Several of these studies focuses on historical events, while other studies focus on particular individuals of high stature in the national pantheon. A second area of scholarly inquiry consists of the literature that focuses on the remembrance of the Holocaust and the commemoration of the two World Wars in Europe. Hence, most studies focused on the social, cultural, individual and political effects of the past on post-World War II society, tracing the consequences of the Holocaust and the two World Wars on the people of Europe and Israel. Commemoration represents the means of recovering the past; hence it is a research site that illustrates the appropriation of the historical record as a vehicle for the construction of national identity.
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