Memory is at once subjective and ineffable, yet the basis of all meaning. This makes it a thorny enough concept for psychologists, let alone social scientists grappling with popular and collective memory. The social is by definition shared, however unequally. What role could public commemorations play in all this? How do they (re)inscribe our understanding of social history, and how might they actively chart the space between official and demotic accounts of the past?

These are the questions animating Ekaterina V. Haskins’s splendid new book, Popular Memories. As the subtitle—including the final plural—suggests, Haskins’s interest is in challenging notions that history is channeled from on high. Instead, she explores both the first-order question of how popular commemorations generate narratives about the past and the second-order question of how public participation in such commemorations can be an expression of creative citizenship. Her model is a “discursive understanding of citizenship” where “the participation of diverse publics” acts “to produce and share stories and symbols,” through commemorations as “both representations of civic identity and sites of stranger interaction” (p. 2).

This pluralistic and bottom-up sociology contrasts with the traditional focus on artifacts and events whose ownership and usages (if not symbolic meanings) are controlled or leased by government (e.g., currency, national holidays: Graeme Orr. “A Fetishised Gift: The Legal Status of Flags,” Griffith Law Review, 19.3 (2010): 504–526). Haskins also seeks to undermine such binary oppositions as “popularization versus democratization, vernacular versus official, authentic experience versus spectacle” (p. 8). To this one could add the formal versus the quotidian.

While the book is suffused with (highly readable) explanations of the theory and academic arguments in the field of “public memory scholarship,” its woof and warp is woven out of four case studies. Each manages to be a detailed, reflective account of a recent commemoration, and yet—unlike many books based on a set of particularizations—to move fairly seamlessly from one chapter to the next. As a whole, then, despite the limitations of an academic study of contemporary events, the book itself forms a kind of commemoration of the dynamic act of generating living history.

The first study is of the U.S. Postal Service’s outsourcing, to the wider American public, the choice of its decade-by-decade series to “Celebrate the Century.” Haskins strains a little in finding an overarching narrative in the project, which she paints as a shift from “Civil Religion to Consumer Society,” that is, from an ideal of collective self-determination to a faux quest for individual fulfillment through the marketplace (pp. 23–28). Although the project engaged many millions of Americans, both in the selection of iconography and its unveiling during tours of the country, the author concludes that it offered a relatively “superficial and largely apolitical” form of participation (p. 43). That the post office itself is now bankrupt, a victim of history and market forces, is an irony that hardly needs mentioning.

To this tale, Haskins juxtaposes a more complex electronic project: the September 11 Digital Archive. The attacks of that day are etched into American, if not Western, consciousness. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the Internet, the most cosmopolitan of media, was recruited through a pair of university-run archives to enable the makeshift physical memorials (to the dead and those missing in the aftermath of 9/11) to be replaced by a more permanent, if intangible and evolving, collection of tributes and reflections.

Without downplaying the personal and cathartic aspects of this venture, Haskins focuses on the historical and public role such a citizen-generated repository can play, at once a source for future social historians and an uneasy navigation of contemporary political divisions. Whereas selecting commemorative stamps by majority vote invites a certain blandness, individual reactions to terrorism could not help but create a “fractious cacophony” (p. 59). This demonstrates both the strength of an open archive and a corresponding tension, given the curatorial desire to not publish rank falsehoods or incitements (p. 61).

The third case studies the post–Hurricane Katrina Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 2006. Again, the book provides a deft juxtaposition: from a bleak memorial about a disaster in the North to a civic celebration in defiance of a disaster in the South. Haskins invokes Kenneth Burke’s idea of the carnival-wake as a “comic frame of acceptance”—except that in this case the acceptance is of nature’s wrath, mixed with affirmation of community and sharp satirizing of governmental failings.

Parades, as the book chronicles, have always smuggled the medicine of politics within the syrup of a party. Of all the events studied, the Katrina Mardi Gras is the most rooted in tradition, yet suffused with a variety of genres of popular performance. The images of elaborate “Knights of Chaos” floats mocking the George W. Bush administration’s “Ship of State” and “Department of Homeland Insecurity” speak louder than any words.

The final case focuses on a major but temporary memorial to the cost of war, the “Eyes Wide Open” project. In this mobile display, visitors were confronted by serried rows of military boots, each tagged with a member of the U.S. armed forces lost in America’s invasions of the 2000s. Similar displays of civilian footwear were also used to mark the deaths of Iraqi citizens. Haskins examines how the project both paid homage to traditional war memorials (the rows of boots mimicking rows of tombstones) and also encouraged participation. As in a formal mourning, family and strangers alike were involved in reading out names and leaving tributes to the dead. They also left poems or badges questioning the value of war, which became part of the moving exhibition.

Notably, Haskins selects cases that though grand in scale are relatively unfixed and evanescent. Within a year, new stamps are released and commemorative ones are relegated to collections; the Mardi Gras recurs, but flows afresh like the proverbial river; a digital archive remains as long as its servers are maintained, but fades into invisibility; and a traveling exhibition of boots is retired. Participatory history can also be monumental, as a visit to any park with a statue erected by public subscription or a plaque over a time capsule interred by local students will attest.

The book’s inspiration, however, is to capture commemorations that bring together mass participation and iconographic resources in the service of public remembrance (p. 17), yet which act like Omar Khayyám’s moving finger. The act of participation generates its own meanings. The display of military boots forms “a plea for its own obsolescence” (p. 115), both because it unfolded as the wars dragged on and because its very purpose was to provoke and hasten an end to those wars.

This is a dense yet engaging contribution, liberally interspersed with illustrations. One regret is that the economics of academic publishing did not permit sharp, let alone color, images. (A small regret: the memorials described are significant enough for images of them to be searchable online). Throughout, Popular Memories also displays an eclecticism of sources, drawing on classical literature, fellow scholars of rhetoric and performance, and, of course, contemporary culture.

The focus is almost entirely on the United States, yet the studies are part of the lingua franca of the liberal West, and the theory cited speaks broadly. An interesting future project would be to examine how organizers of memorials are learning techniques internationally. Haskins notes how the military boots gesture to the NAMES quilt, whose individual patches commemorated AIDS victims. Intriguingly, it also reminds this reader of “The Sea of Hands,” an Indigenous-Australian project begun in 1997, which toured thousands of colored plastic hands, planted in public spaces and festooned with messages of racial reconciliation.

Ultimately, Haskins’s is an optimistic voice. If “citizenship is a relationship amongst strangers,” she reasons, then popular commemorations can navigate the divide between a privatized and fractured culture, by allowing participants to collectively produce memorials and events that mediate “between private remembrance and stories of nationhood” (p. 118).