Cohorts, Chronology, and Collective Memories

We asked Americans to tell us the national and world eventsthat they believe to have been especially important since the1930s, using replicated cross-section surveys carried out in1985, in 2000, and after September 11, 2001. Our primary interestsare, first, in how collective memories change as new eventsoccur, such as the end of the Cold War or the 9/11 terroristattack; and second, in whether the origin of such memories duringthe critical period of adolescence and early adulthood, as wellas their connection with education, remain stable over timeand consistent with theory. As part of our investigation weconsider four related issues: collective forgetting as wellas collective remembering; the distinction between ease of recallingevents and judgments of their importance; compound events, whichare composed of sub-events that can be remembered separatelyby respondents; and larger social and technological changesdifficult or impossible to date with any precision. Panel datafrom the second and third surveys, obtained shortly before andafter 9/11, aid in determining which earlier collective memorieswere superseded by memories of the terrorist attack itself.

For I myself can now remember my first day ... more exactly,when I think of it, than all the ones that followed. Imre Kertész,Fateless, on his first day in Auschwitz at age 14