The best books on how states manipulate historical memory

The United States may have lost the war against North Vietnam; but it has since defeated the Vietnamese in the war for memory. Nothing Ever Dies is an examination of what Nguyen calls, “The Industry of Memory,” the production and distribution of collective memory in the service of powerful interests. He explains how the United States utilizes memorials, film, and print journalism to promote its own stories of the war while marginalizing Vietnamese narratives. Meanwhile, the post-1975 Vietnamese regime works to erase the memory of South Vietnam. Our goal, he suggests, should be the realization of an ‘ethical memory,’ one that creates space for the remembrance of both ‘us’ and ‘them’. This is a beautifully written, deeply personal, thoughtful discussion of the legacy of a conflict that continues to define both countries.  

June 4, 1989 changed everything in China. When People’s Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians, they killed hundreds of people and destroyed the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. A quarter-century later, this event remains buried in China's modern history, successfully expunged from collective memory. In The People's Republic of Amnesia, Louisa Lim investigates how the Chinese state re-wrote its own history to absolve itself of those killings. By explaining state efforts to erase Tiananmen, and how non-state actors attempt to revive its memory, this book invites us to consider the consequences of suppressing the past.  

In the 1980s, Chinese students seeking democratic reforms pushed the Communist Party to the breaking point. Why then, is this current generation of Chinese youth so fiercely nationalistic? This question motivated Zheng Wang to examine how Beijing re-structured the country’s education system beginning in the 1990s. Chinese educators began cultivating suspicion of The West by teaching a history of ‘National Humiliation,’ creating a collective memory of how China was bullied or victimized by Europe and Japan. This narrative of National Humiliation, Zheng suggests, also explains China’s disproportionate responses to perceive slights on the international stage. There is an entire industry of books claiming expertise on the Chinese worldview, but this is one of the best. 

In 1922, protestors in the northern Indian town of Chauri Chaura set fire to a local police station, killing the twenty-two policemen trapped inside. The event prompted Ghandi to question whether Indians were ready for independence and led to a suspension of the non-cooperation campaign. In his book, Amin explores how memory of this local affair, marked by violence, became entangled in a larger national narrative that emphasized non-violence. The result is a work that deconstructs how historical narrative is produced, and how the story of Chauri Chaura differs based on whether it's told by regional or state and national parties. This book is highly original in its presentation, use of source material, and methods of analysis. 

What happens when a society is unwilling to acknowledge acts of barbarism in its past? In 1976, while leading a student protest at Thammasat University, Thongchai Winichakul watched in horror as government forces and rightist elements stormed the campus, killing over eighty of his fellow students and committing unspeakable acts on the living and the dead. He wrote this book to help process memories of an atrocity that took the lives of his friends and haunted his career as a Thai historian. To this day, the Thammasat massacre is marked only by silence from official sources. As a result, Thongchai observes that Thai society is trapped in a state of ‘unforgetting,’ unable to either remember or forget the trauma.