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.
Introduction: Local Acts of Placing and Remembering / James Opp and John C. Walsh
Part 1: Commemorations: Marking Memories of Place
1 Performing Public Memory and Re-Placing Home in the Ottawa Valley, 1900-58 /