Memorial museums, historical monuments, and commemorations of historical events are spaces where memories—personal, institutional, civic, and historical—often collide. Those same spaces, not just classrooms, also serve to instruct the public about the events and their significance in history, especially for those with no personal memory of them. When museums, monuments, and commemorations depict historical atrocities and traumas, the collision of memories often provoke contested historical narratives. Emotions also have a function in the shaping of historical narratives. Leaders make decisions in part from their own emotions and, at times, to provoke emotions that can have long-term impact on both history and commemoration. Communities bind together around memory and historical narratives fueled by emotion. This interdisciplinary, international panel will consider some contested narratives, and what they suggest about U.S. and South Korean society. The Jeju Massacre epitomized post-war anti-communist political oppression in South Korea that was supported by the United States. Suppression of the story for some forty-five years has now given way to a fascinating, but contested, memorial reckoning. Memorialization of racial violence in the U.S. is increasingly depicted in the language of “terrorism,” and now can usefully be compared with memories of the 9/11 attacks stirred by simply invoking that term. Not just divergent narratives of the actual violence, but the very meanings of terms like “terror” are contested in new public institutions memorializing systemic racism in Montgomery, Alabama and Tulsa, Oklahoma. As a national trauma, the 9/11 attacks quickly generated divergent memorial narratives, despite the vigorous efforts of political leaders to deliver a single one, and to shut down alternatives. In the end, views of FDNY personnel, of family victim groups, of citizens in local community commemorations—all in addition to those political leaders—show how fraught and complex memories of 9/11 remain.

Many related questions can be considered: who “owns” the process of historical interpretation of atrocity and national trauma? Who was the perpetrator and who was the victim in any contested traumatic memory or narrative? Have those identifications changed over time? What were the causes of the atrocity or trauma? What is the significance of such events for individual victims, for organizations, for local communities, for a government, or for society at large? How has the rhetoric of trauma and atrocity been appropriated later on, by whom, and with what apparent intentions? Have contests over the truth about modern atrocities and trauma resulted in misinformation and ignorance regarding the factual historical record? How is the record of such events presented in public, and how does that public presentation influence the way the events are remembered in textbooks, classrooms, and popular media? This discussion is timely in light of the American Historical Association’s January 2024 resolution In Defense of the Right to Learn, defending the teaching of undistorted, accurate history. The discussion will reflect the Association’s commitment to Teaching History with Integrity, through “truthful and rigorous inquiry,” against the promotion of “ignorance in service of misleading notions of unity.”