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Collective Memory
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  1. Activist archiving in Toronto
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2013
    People gather in Toronto to discuss what many hope will grow into a movement for archiving grassroots histories.
  2. The Arc of Justice and the Long Run
    Hope, History, and Unpredictability

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2013
    North American cicada nymphs live underground for 17 years before they emerge as adults. Many seeds stay dormant far longer than that before some disturbance makes them germinate. Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.
  3. The Battle of Chile
    Chile, Obstinate Memory

    Resource Type: Film/Video
    Published: 1979
    The Battle of Chile is a documentary film directed by the Chilean Patricio Guzman, in three parts: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (1975), The Coup d'état (1976), Popular Power (1979). It is a chronicle of the political tension in Chile in 1973 and of the violent counter revolution against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. It won the Grand Prix in 1975 and 1976 at the Grenoble International Film Festival.
  4. Bequests
    Leaving a social justice legacy

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Many of us have made working for social justice a lifetime commitment. If you are thinking about leaving a legacy for social justice that will live on, you might want to consider leaving a bequest to Connexions in your will.
  5. Bhopal's Fight for Memory
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    In December, 1984, unknown poisonous gases burst out from a Union Carbide pesticide plant located in a vicinity of the city of Bhopal in central India. The plant, scheduled for possible closure, was understaffed, not maintained adequately, and had already seen prior deaths from exposure to leaks.
  6. Burning History in San Salvador
    Destruction of Historical and Human Rights Archives

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2013
    On Thursday, Nov. 14, three armed men broke into the offices of Pro-Búsqueda. The attack on Pro-Búsqueda was not a random crime. We should be worried about what is happening in El Salvador.
  7. The Case for Grassroots Archives
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2012
    Grassroots archives play a valuable role in what has been called "the battle of memory". People's history projects such as grassroots archives preserve and share stories of resistance, hidden histories, and alternative visions.
  8. The Cochabamba Water War of 2000 in 2014
    Today's Betrayers Will Not Erase Our Memory

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    Today's betrayers will not erase our memory: Fourteen years ago we won, today it seems like we lost, but we have to rise again to win, and we already know how to do it. From April 4 to 14 in the year 2000 the so-called "Final Battle" was waged in Cochabamba, Bolivia to prevent the privatization of our water. It was part of a strategy designed by the people of Cochabamba in the "Water War" that started on November 12, 1999. Today, after fourteen years of this historic struggle, the people's demands are still the same: democracy, transparency, participation and an economic model that allows us all to enjoy the riches that our Mother Earth generously provides for the benefit of all.
  9. Collective Memory, Archives, and the Connexions project
    Michael Riordon interviews Ulli Diemer

    Resource Type: Audio
    Published: 2012
    An interview with Ulli Diemer about the Connexions project, collective memory, and the importance of archives and the challenges faced by those who work to preserve them.
  10. Collective Memory - Archives: Ulli Diemer - Selected snippets & quotes from Radical Digressions
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2018
  11. Collective Memory and Cultural Amnesia
    Introduction to the December 17, 2017 issue of Other Voices

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Our society is obsessed with the short-term present. It devalues memories and the past. That's the nature of capitalism, especially the speeded-up hypercapitalism of today. The past is useless: profits are made by getting rid of the old and replacing it with something new.
  12. Connexions Archive seeks a new home
    Sources News Release

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2009
    The Connexions Archive, a Toronto-based library dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots movements for social change, needs a new home.
  13. Connexions Library: History Focus Page
    Resource Type: Website
    Published: 2012
    Selected articles, books, documents and other resources on historical topics.
  14. Connexions Library: Oral History Focus Page
    Resource Type: Website
    Published: 2012
    Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on oral history.
  15. Connexions Library: Radical and Left History Focus Page
    Resource Type: Website
    Published: 2012
  16. Connexions Mandate and Statement of Values
    Resource Type: Article
    A succinct summary of the Connexions project and the values that guide it.
  17. The Digital Dark Ages: Movies and Books Get Deleted as Selfies Pile Up
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    Historians and archivists call our times the "digital dark ages." The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1000 years. But don't blame the Visigoths or the Vandals. The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we've seen big 8" floppies replaced by 5.25" medium replaced by little 3.5" floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud -- and let's not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc.
  18. Galeano, Eduardo
    Wikipedia article

    Resource Type: Article
    Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist (1940-2015). His best-known works are Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) and Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire Trilogy, 1982–6). "I'm a writer," the author once said of himself, "obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia."
  19. Germany and Britain: Memory and Myopia
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    Ernst Barlach was one of Germany's great expressionist artists of the early twentieth century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to the First World War, Barlach found that his experience of the Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering that he saw as the human condition.
  20. How Truth Slips Down The Memory Hole
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2007
    John Pilger, applies to current events Orwell's description in '1984' of how the Ministry of Truth consigned embarrassing truth to a memory hole. He highlights the killing of a Palestinian cameraman by the Israelis as an example of how "we" are trained to look on the rest of the world as quite unlike ourselves: useful or expendable.
  21. Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
    Resource Type: Database
    Published: 2005
    The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts. We hope to foster some positive legacies by allowing the people affected by these storms to tell their stories in their own words, which as part of the historical record will remain accessible to a wide audience for generations to come.
  22. The Inner Light
    Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5 Episode 25

    Resource Type: Film/Video
    Published: 1992
    Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is struck with an energy beam from an alien probe. While minutes pass for the rest of the crew, Picard experiences 40 years as Kamin, a humanoid scientist whose planet is threatened by the nova of its sun.
  23. Israel's road signs policy 'erases memory of place'
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    Israeli authorities have long banned the Palestinian Authority (PA) from putting up its own road signs that refer to Palestinian towns and villages.
  24. Librarians and Palestine
    An Interview with Vani Natarajan

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2013
    Working to preserve Palestinian records and memory in the face of deliberate destruction by Israel.
  25. Memory Against Forgetting: the Resonance of Bloody Sunday
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    The museum John guards is a physical manifestation of the moral necessity of remembering that day’s cataclysmic violence. An attempt to remember the silences imposed on peoples’ experiences by time and traumatised memory, and, most of all, murderous rampage. And of course, if those left behind do not remember who will? It certainly will not be the guilty.
  26. Memory as Resistance: Grassroots Archives and the Battle of Memory
    Preservation as subversion: Do grassroots archives have a future?

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2012
    CONNEXIONS and Beit Zatoun are spotlighting grassroots archives this November with an open house and networking event November 24, a talk and discussion November 27, and an exhibit (November 16-27). Grassroots archives play a valuable role in what has been called “the battle of memory”. Mainstream media and institutions of power consign inconvenient histories, struggles, and alternative visions to what George Orwell called “the memory hole.” People’s history projects such as grassroots archives preserve and share stories of resistance, hidden histories, and alternative visions. Their role is particularly important as official archives are forced to restrict acquisitions, limit access and discard materials as funding is slashed.
  27. The Memory Code: how oral cultures memorise so much information
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Long before the ancient Celts, Aboriginal Australians were recording vast scores of knowledge to memory and passing it to successive generations. Aboriginal people demonstrate that their oral traditions are not only highly detailed and complex, but they can survive -- accurately -- for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years.
  28. Memory of Fire: Genesis
    Part One of a Triology

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1985
    A meditation on the clashes between the Old World and the New, and an an attempt "to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America." A fierce, impassioned, and kaleidoscopic historical experience that takes us from the creation myths of the Makiritare Indians of the Yukatan to Columbus's first joyous moments in the New World to the English capture of New York.
  29. Memory of Fire: Faces & Masks
    Part Two of a Trilogy

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1998
    A view of the 'New World' in the making, from the 1700s to the end of the nineteenth century.
  30. Memory of Fire: Century of the Wind
    Part Three of a Trilogy

    Resource Type: Book
  31. Memory and Repression in El Salvador
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2013
    The raid on Pro-Busqueda happened three days after the Salvadorean Supreme Court heard testimony from survivors of a 1982 raid carried out by government forces.
  32. Mirrors
    Stories of Almost Everyone

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2009
    Open any history book and you'll learn about revolutionary leaders, decorated generals, genius scientists and passionate artists. What about the leaders’ assistants? The loyal soldiers? The helpful lab assistants and the inspirations for great art? History books are so filled with greatness that the stories of the people are often neglected. Mirrors resolves this issue. Mirrors is a mosaic of humanity.
  33. Museum of the World and Image
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2013
    Challenges the "official narrative" that re-writes the Civil War as a struggle of "national security" against an "internal communist threat," manifested in the form of unions, student groups, human rights and refugee organizations, progressive Christian base communities, and the peasant insurgency of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
  34. Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)
    Resource Type: Film/Video
    Published: 2010
    In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers search the sky and explore the origins of the universe. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones murdered and dumped in the desert by the Pinochet dictatorship. The desert also holds the stories of pre-Columbian indigenous societies, 19th-century miners, and political prisoners. A meditation on astronomy, the past, memory, and persistence.
  35. One by One, South Sudan Tries to Name Its War Victims
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    In South Sudan, where a vicious civil war has been raging, no government office or nongovernmental organization has kept a tally of the names of those killed by government forces, rebels, and other armed groups. But in a country in which automatic weapons are more plentiful than civil rights, and local journalists are regularly under assault, a tiny civil society group is trying to step into the breach by naming all of the names. It began on the first anniversary of the civil war's outbreak, when a small group of volunteers unveiled a list of 568 names of the people - from toddlers to centenarians - killed in the war to that point. Naming the Ones We Lost was a first step in what the organizers knew would be a long journey to grapple with the immense loss of South Sudanese life over the previous year. Today, the project goes by a slightly different name, Remembering the Ones We Lost, and has a radically expanded mission with a recently launched website [http://rememberingoneswelost.com/main]. The goal of the website is nothing short of remarkable - it aims to name all victims of conflict and armed violence in South Sudan since 1955.
  36. Oral history
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    The recording, preservation and interpretation of historical information, based on the personal experiences and recollections of the speaker.
  37. Oral tradition
    Wikipedia article

    Resource Type: Article
    Cultural material and tradition transmitted orally from one generation to another.
  38. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 13, 2014
    Libertarian Socialism

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2014
    The topic of the week is Libertarian Socialism. Articles on no-state solutions in Kurdistan; right-wing dirty tricks used to attack labour and environmental groups; scientists unravelling the risks of new pesticides; the terrors faced by fishermen in Gaza; and bringing books and seeking peace in Colombia. Film of the week is Even the Rain, and book of the week is Adolph Reed's Class Notes.
  39. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - February 12, 2015
    SYRIZA

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2015
    This week we're featuring the 40-point program which SYRIZA, the Greek coalition of the radical left, put forward to win the Greek election. Oliver Tickell writes about the mass media's latest campaign of pro-war propaganda, this time revolving around supposed "Russian aggression" in Ukraine, while Paul Edwards looks at another form of war propaganda, Clint Eastwood's 'American Sniper'. The Topic of the Week is Water Rights. Related items include the film "Blue Gold: World Water Wars," the featured website International Rivers, and articles on water-related struggles, past and present, including articles on the Walkerton water disaster and the Cochabamba water war.
  40. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 12, 2015
    Organizing

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2015
    The focus of this issue is organizing. How can we challenge and overcome entrenched structures of economic and political power? Our own source of power is our latent ability to join together and work toward common goals, collectively. That requires organizing. Power gives way only when it is challenged by powerful movements for change, and movements grow out of organizing. In this newsletter, we feature a number of articles, books, and other organizing resources.
  41. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - January 16, 2016
    Working class organizing

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2016
    Working to change things for the better, fighting to prevent things from getting worse, remembering the past to illuminate possibilities for the future: as always, that is the focus of Other Voices. In this issue, we pay special attention to working class organizing. There can be no meaningful change without the active participation of the majority of the population: working people. Yet much activism ignores this obvious reality, while the organized labour union movement has put much of its reliance on 'professionals' who see organizing as a top-down technique rather than a grassroots movement. Several articles in this issue look at aspects of these issues. We also delve into the relationship between feminism and socialism, and look at the so-called 'sharing economy,' which produces increasingly exploited and precarious work, and immense profits for super-rich corporate owners.
  42. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 17, 2017
    Collective Memory and Cultural Amnesia

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2017
    Our society is obsessed with the short-term present. It devalues memory and the past. But there are those who do remember, and who work to preserve and share our collective memory. But they have to contend with those of us who see historical memory as a way of contributing to the struggle for a different world. For us, knowledge of history is subversive, and remembering can be a form of resistance.
  43. Palestinian Memory and Hope
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    A group of activists are working to create a Nakba Museum of Memory and Hope in Washington, D.C. The project aims to tell the Palestinian refugee story, one that has been silenced or ignored for too long.
  44. People's Archive of Rural India
    Resource Type: Organization
    Recording the everyday lives of everyday people.
  45. People's History, Memory & Archives
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    A gateway to resources on people's history and grassroots archives.
  46. Ragpicking Through History: Class Memory, Class Struggle and its Archivists
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Our current conjuncture invites a renewed rethinking of two historical imaginaries: first, what is class memory? To ask this question is really to reopen a discussion on what is class struggle – and, more specifically, how does our collective memorialisation of struggles past inform our relationship to struggle in the present. Second, and relatedly, who can be this struggle's archivist?
  47. Rescuing Memory: the Humanist Interview with Noam Chomsky
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
  48. Seeds of Fire
    A People's Chronology

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Recalling events that happened on this day in history. Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.
  49. The Slave Narratives
    American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography

    Resource Type: Website
    Interviews with former slaves. Nearly all of the information presented here came from the WPA collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, in addition to the 232 boxes of unprocessed material and county histories.
  50. "The struggle of memory against forgetting"
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2008
    This excellent address by filmmaker and journalist John Pilger reminds us all of an uncomfortable truth - that all the great breakthroughs in history, like the end of apartheid in South Africa, happened because ordinary people fought for it.
  51. Torture, Democracy and Memory in Argentina
    No Sugarplums for Christmas

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
  52. The War on Memory Begins in Argentina
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Within less than a month of the inauguration of the new Macri/Cambiemos government in Argentina, the new leadership, or gestión (management) as they prefer to be called, acted in a great sweeping hurry. Argentine congress, full of opposition parliamentarians from the Frente Para la Victoria Party that lost the presidential race by 2% of the vote, was closed for the summer holidays that take place in the ardent month of December, as much of the urban population of Argentina seeks to carelessly flock to the seaside.
  53. Whatever Happened to High School History?
    Burying the Political Memory of Youth, Ontario: 1945-1995

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1995
    A look at how high school history was taught between the 1940's and 1990's, and subsequent decline iof the discipline that used to be a core subject in Canadian secondary education.


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