Places are imagined, made, claimed, fought for and defended, and always in a state of becoming. This important book explores the historical and theoretical relationships among place, community, and public memory across differing chronologies and geographies within twentieth-century Canada. It is a collaborative work that shifts the focus from nation and empire to local places sitting at the intersection of public memory making and identity formation – main streets, city squares and village museums, internment camps, industrial wastelands, and the landscape itself.

With a focus on the materiality of image, text, and artefact, the essays gathered here argue that every act of memory making is simultaneously an act of forgetting; every place memorialized is accompanied by places forgotten.

James Opp is assistant professor, history, Carleton University.

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The many different angles from which the contributors approach their subjects provide the oral historian with valuable methodological insight, showing how photographs, monuments, and public spaces can become catalysts for inquiry into human memory and the meaning of that memory.

Oral History Review