How objective are our history books? This addition to the Writing History series examines the critical role that memory plays in the writing of history.
This book includes:
- Essays from an international team of historians, bringing together analysis of forms of public history such as museums, exhibitions, memorials and speeches
- Coverage of the ancient world to the present, on topics such as oral history and generational and collective memory
- Two key case studies on Holocaust memorialisation and the memory of Communism

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute of Social Movements and the House for the History of the Ruhr at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.
Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is author (with JKA Thomaneck) of Dividing and Uniting Germany (2000), and of Facing the Nazi Past (2001) and The Buchenwald Child (2007). He is also the editor of Germans as Victims and has published widely on many areas of post-1918 German history.

Introduction - Bill Niven (Nottingham Trent University, UK) and Stefan Berger (Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany)
1. Memory and History in the Ancient World - Gordon Shrimpton (Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria, Canada)
2. Memory and History in the Middle Ages - Kimberly Rivers (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, USA)
3. History-writing and 'Collective Memory' - Mary Fulbrook (UCL, UK)
4. Memory as both Source and Subject of Study: The Transformations of Oral History - Lynn Abrams (University of Glasgow, UK)
5. Generation and Memory: A Critique of the Ethical and Ideological Implications of Generational Narration - Wulf Kansteiner (Binghamton University, USA)
6. Writing the History of National Memory - Stefan Berger and Bill Niven
7. Lieux de mémoire - A European Transfer Story - Benoît Majerus (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)
8. On the Memory of Communism in Eastern and Central Europe - Attila Pok (Resarch Centre for Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
9. Holocaust Memoriography and the Impact of Memory on the Historiography of the Holocaust - Peter Carrier (Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, Germany)
10. History and Memorialisation - Richard Crownshaw (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)