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"Collective memory is the outcome of processes affecting, respectively, the information to which individuals have access, the schemata by which people understand the past, and the external symbols or messages that prime these schemata" (DiMaggio 1997:275). This is a mostly informal process. Maurice Halbwachs is one of the early and most influential thinkers in the area of collective memory. His work originally published in 1941 and 1952 has recently been edited and translated by Lewis Coser (1992). Halbwachs’s primary thesis is that human memory can only function within a collective context. A context that can be evoked by, for example, war memorials or socially significant anniversaries but also by family reminiscences or accounts of significant events in the past of a group or a category of people.
Linenthal (1991) describes the process as it relates to war and war memorials in his book called Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. He notes that the battlefields function to venerate, define, and inspire.
In a later work Linethal and Engelhardt (1996) describe the proposed Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum’s exhibit of the Enola Gay’s mission, its aftermath, the bomb’s role in ending the war, and the new era it inaugurated.

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I have become a nationally recognized scholar in the area of minority groups with two major publications of late in addition to giving twenty scholarly presentations at regional and national professional meetings. Seven of the presentations were on minority groups. The two major publications are
• Dominant-Minority Relations in America: Linking Personal History with the Convergence in the New World, 2003
• Minority Voices: Linking Personal Ethnic History and the Sociological Imagination, 2005 (actually available summer 2004)
Since I began teaching I have taught the Sociology of Minority Groups. I have taught it almost continually. Using sociological theory, I have always endeavored to get students to see the part that they and their family played in the dominant-minority struggle in this country over the generations. I incorporated this process of having students use their own family history in Dominant-Minority Relations in America. The textbook, published by Allyn and Bacon, is used in close to 40 college and university classrooms including the University of North Florida, University of Memphis, University of Idaho, Southern Illinois University, Leman College of CUNY, Hofstra University, Boston College, University of Michigan, West Chester University and Temple University. I am now in the process of preparing a second edition of the textbook.

After the publication of the textbook in 2003, I began work on a companion reader, which recently came out and is also published by Allyn and Bacon. Minority Voices contains 18 original articles in which professional sociologists describe their family history. The process of recruiting sociologists from many different ethnic backgrounds was a difficult but satisfying process. The interaction among the group over the last two years has produced a most interesting book and has increased my contacts in this area of study.