Foreword: Historical Remembrance in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

By JAY WINTER The role of remembrance in public life has expanded radically over the past century. In part this is due to the democratization of war fare. Before 1914, the vast majority of those who served, were injured, or died in war were volun teers or mercenaries. After 1914, conscript armies fought wars and left bereaved parents, widows, and orphans behind in numbers that were never before registered. Inevitably, this meant that the history of warfare and family his tory came to be bound together. War memorials proliferated in villages and towns throughout Europe and beyond, largely to preserve the names of the fallen. The overwhelming majority of these sites list names alphabetically and not by rank. Maya Lin s Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D. C, consciously designed to fol low the First World War model, does it another way, by recording the names of the dead by the date they died. The result is the same: the sixty thousand American dead of the Vietnam War are