| Notes | '79-80 By the nineteenth century, other, seemingly more proficient, methods [80] were devised to foster the requisite collective memories. With the introduction of compulsory schooling in most of western Europe and North American around mid-century, educational institutions began to be effective transmitters of social and political memories. In primary and secondary schools, children were systematically taught both the historical facts deemed worthy of recall and the normative values from the past to which they needed to pay allegiance.'
'141-153 - noncontemporaneity 141 a better, or at any rate less vague, term than "the forgotten" to refer to the disjecta membrae of present-day consciousness might be the "noncontemporaneous." 145Baron Hausmman's urban planning in] the renovation of Paris in the 1850s and the 1860s [& Baudelaire] Haussman razed a large portion of vieux Paris in order to create a modern, streamlined capital city. In the course of doing so he not only tore down ancient buildings and ripped up old streets, squares, and passageways that had been a part of the Parisian /habitus/ for generations; he also abolished the long-standing personal and communal relationships existing in and around these sites. For those who experienced the shock of such transformations of the environment, the world began to look and feel quite different.'
'1-7 The Past in the Present [Reasons why memory was so important] at least until the beginning of the modern period. 1) - [survival] Before writing came into use as a kind of /aide-mémoire,/ it was the power of individual memory more than anything else that preserved the knowledge of how to make a fire, build a hut, fashion a weapon, or kill game. 2, [retention of communal values] [2] I would not e too much to say that in prehistoric and early historic times, memory, especially the memory of essential admonitions, injunctions, and precepts passed down from time immemorial, was the way to truth, while forgetting was the road to untruth. 3. Third, memory played a crucial role in giving people a consistent sense of identity. By remembering one's own continuity in time, one achieved some degree of ontological security, some sense of who one had been in the past and still was in the present. [now, valuations of memory and forgetting reevaluated.] A case can be made, for example, that in our late modern age people no longer treat memory as a reservoir of vital information for the living of their lives. More common is the assumption that in the fast-paced world of the present much or even most of the data stored in one's memory is outmoded, for the information that may have seemed useful or relevant even a decade or two ago (when it was first gathered and processed in the mind) has probably in the meantime become obsolete. [3] [contemporary, psychological] assault on reliability of memory. [early/pre-modern assumptions]; mnemonic imprints, memories could be stored [4] and recovered intact [5] Thus today we have a perhaps unprecedented sense that both personal and collective memories lack veracity; that they are not only flawed but potentially harmful or damaging; and that, as a consequence, they no longer deserve the place of importance they have held for millennia. '
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