Exploration of how one particular event or person is "remembered"

For this assignment, choose a person, event, or object and then explore how that person, event, or object has been remembered differently across a range of media and/or time.  You might, for example, decide to investigate the memory/memories of someone like Angela Davis, now professor at UC Berkeley who was arrested and tried for murder in 1970.  At the time of the arrest and trial, the news accounts in magazines and newspapers "remembered" Davis in very different ways, and the disparity between predominantly white news media representations and those of predominantly Black news media was profound.  Pictures of Davis at the time could make her look like a heroÑor a villain.  In addition, at least one song was written about her, again "remembering" her in a distinct way.

We have just looked at various rememberings of the Holocaust and noted the ways in which different media evoke different kinds of representations or memories.  The Holocaust is a vast subject, and for the next assignment you should focus on something much more manageableÑlike an event that happened on one day (a famous sporting or musical event, perhaps?), a person, or even a particular product.  For example, it might be interesting to take something like Dr. Pepper and see how that product gets remembered at different times and in different media.  My guess is that early Dr. Pepper advertisements were notably different from those that appeared on televisionÑor than those that appear today on billboards.

Your goal is to study the way something is represented and hence rememberedÑand to think hard about what has influenced that representation/remembering. 

Plan to present this exploration in writing, and to give a brief overview of your findings in class.  Given our time limitations, I'd guess you would need no more than five or six pages to present your findings, though I don't have any set page limit in mind.

Finally, we could brainstorm about possible topics for this project — over email or in the dorm.  Let me know if you want to talk further about this!

Andrea