History and Popular Memory Quotes

“The power of the historian’s truth often has a difficult time competing with the power of the right story, even though (or perhaps precisely because) the latter has been hopelessly adulterated with myth and legend,”
― Paul A. Cohen, History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis

“Memory plays an essential part in this process of working out a sat-isfactory relationship between past and present. It is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling the past. But it is a faculty that functions in a wide range of ways. Memory can operate comprehensively or selectively, more or less accurately, more or less honestly. It is always accompanied, moreover, by forgetting and invariably supplemented by invention.”
― Paul A. Cohen, History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis