How should pivotal historical events be recorded? Depicted? Commemorated?

"Recent controversies in public history, from the 'Disney's America' theme park to the Smithsonian Institution's Enola Gay exhibit, have highlighted the contested nature of collective memory," says Cornell University graduate student Jeffrey Hyson. Such debates are themselves powerful reminders of the uneasy alliance of history and memory, he said. That alliance is the theme of a conference that will be held on the Cornell campus April 11 through 13, titled "History and Memory: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference." All programs are free and open to the public and will be held in the A.D. White House on the Cornell campus. The conference is being sponsored by the Department of History, Society for the Humanities, Graduate and Professional Student Assembly and Graduate History Association.

"I think the World War II/Holocaust anniversaries in the 1980s and '90s really brought the problem of history and memory to the fore, both in academic discourse and public consciousness," said Hyson, who is chair of the Graduate History Association conference committee. "And the controversies over recent 'historical' films like JFK, Malcolm X, Panther and Nixon illuminate yet another area of this field -- the power of imaginative works about the past which follow neither 'historical fact' nor 'authentic memory.'"

The controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit (ultimately scrapped), in which a display of part of the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima would have been presented with extensive commentary that many veterans' groups found pro- Japanese, "demonstrated the continuing tension between history and memory," Hyson said. "Veterans claimed that historians (especially younger historians) couldn't understand what they'd been through near the end of World War II, while historians insisted that their research told a different story.

"Issues of history and memory almost necessarily extend across traditional disciplinary boundaries, embracing history, anthropology, oral history, psychology, literature, communications, sociology and many other fields," he added.

Thus, the Cornell conference will approach the intersection of history and memory from a range of disciplines, as reflected in the titles of the panels: "Literary Memories of World War II," "Rituals of American Politics," "Race and Historical Memory in the United States," "Politics, Culture and Native American Memory," "Confronting World War II: Museums and Oral History" and "Memory and the Representation of the Holocaust."

The "History and Memory" conference will feature two keynote speakers. Michael Kammen, the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell, will give a lecture on Thursday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. titled "The Problem of Memory in Contemporary Historiography and Public Culture." Kammen, the outgoing president of the Organization of American Historians, is the author of 1993's Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for another book, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization.

Steven Aschheim, associate professor of German cultural and intellectual history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, will give a lecture at 3:30 p.m. Friday, April 12, titled "New Directions and Issues in Holocaust Historiography." The first professor of Judaic Studies at Reed College in Portland, Ore., where he taught from 1980 to 1982, Aschheim is the author of The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 and Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923.

Though several sessions at the conference will address events surrounding World War II, other milestones also will be explored, in such presentations as "The King Must Die: The Funerals of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy," by Nancy Banks of the New School for Social Research Department of Political Science; "Karenga, Kawaida and the Organization Us: A Challenge to African-American Historical Memory," by Cornell graduate student Scot Ngozi-Brown; and "Decolonized Territory: Native American Documentary and Cultural Revival," by Michelle Stewart of the University of Minnesota Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature.

"What I believe every scholar of history and memory hopes to do -- and perhaps this may be a theme of our conference -- is to demonstrate that history and memory are neither easy allies nor constant opponents, but are instead enmeshed in an ambiguous, often strangely symbiotic relationship," Hyson said.

For further information about the "History and Memory" conference, call Hyson at (607) 277-7607.