The Memory of the Modern - Softcover

The Memory of the Modern provides a striking and wide-ranging analysis of the character and the conflicted centrality of memory in the modern period. Matt Matsuda's book complements recent studies of the memory problem in its historical groundedness, its narrative liveliness, and its inventive sense of the breadth and variety of cultural material relevant to the understanding of memory's epochal complication. (Richard Terdiman, University of California, Santa Cruz)

Matt Matsuda has written a richly suggestive work of cultural history. The Memory of the Modern is original, provocative and a pleasure to read. (Michael S. Roth, Director, European Studies, Claremont Graduate School)

...enchantingly evocative and intellectually challenging....Matsuda's masterpiece is destined to help us comprehend our present by helping us apprehend our past. (Narasingha Sil)

I believe that Matsuda has made an important contribution to both urban and social history, and one which will be of importance in the coming decades to Western scholars, whose research is bound to be characterized by increaingly urbanized social structures and, therefore, by policies and perspectives which depend on these structures....All of his work, including this book, should have an important place on library shelves and in the collections of scholars in modern French history. (Libraries and Culture)

The book makes a provocative contribution to the scholarly literature on the anxieties that beset French and European culture in the half-century that preceded 1914...Matsuda brings together diverse elements of high and low culture, old traditions and new technological innovations, and finds significant connections among them. (American Historical Review)

A multidisciplinary work, Memory of the Modern examines stock markets, tango dancers, vagabond murderers, neurology, monument destruction, and colonial policies to document how individuals and institutions shaped memory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wonderfully written, the book studies these diverse "memory-sites" to show how memory and history are fought over, shaped, and put to personal and ideological use.