Pierre Nora, who has written extensively on collective memory in France, has argued that before the nineteenth century we didn’t need objects to remember the past. Memory was engrained in local cultures, habits, and customs. But as the great changes of the twentieth century seemed to speed up history, and as memory became more removed from everyday experience, we began to feel a powerful urge to hold memories not just in our minds but in specific things and places—like monuments and street names.
