Memory, Erasure, and Reassignment

History is often treated as a record of what happened.Memory, however, is a record of what was carried forward.What societies remember is never neutral. Memory is shaped by survival, by power, by trauma, and by intention. Some events are carefully preserved. Others are fragmented, renamed, or buried—not always through overt erasure, but through silence, compression, and repetition of partial truths.

In examining collective memory, we are not only asking what occurred, but why certain moments endure while others fade. Sites like Black Wall Street, Red Summer, and countless unnamed communities reveal how memory and power intersect—how destruction can be followed by forgetting, and how forgetting can be mistaken for absence.

Memory does not disappear on its own. It is either carried, displaced, or reassigned.

This section approaches memory as a living process—one that moves across generations, institutions, and cultural narratives. To study memory is to study responsibility: who carries the story, who benefits from its framing, and what is required to restore context where it has been thinned.