Project Summary Objectives: Autobiographical memory became the focus of sustained scientific study in the nineteenth century, and in recent generations it has become one of the most controversial topics of psychological research. This project will examine the rise of memory science in Anglo-American society. It begins at the end of the nineteenth century, when nascent psychological fields were producing dramatically new approaches to the study of how past events were experienced and recorded. It then examines a series of related episodes tracking the fate of memory science, ending with the memory wars of the 1980s and 1990s.A central objective is to examine the changing legal and cultural status of psychological expertise. The project studies the effects of experiments, crimes, and cases on the legal status of memory, and how memory research was affected by the law. Similar questions have been discussed in broader studies of science and the law, but memory as exhibited in the courtrooma crucial aspect of judicial processes has not received a sustained historical study. The project also examines the relationship between memory and media. The new recording technologies of the twentieth century (especially tape recorders and motion-pictures) became models of technological memory, and from them have been drawn models of internal memory. This project examines how new technologies were taken up by memory researchers, and how such appropriations were tailored to the concerns of particular communities. Methods: The PI has selected a number of specific episodes for detailed archival investigation, rather than attempting to take the measure of such a vast subject by a more comprehensive approach. This approach allows the project to build into an account that is at once chronologically broad, properly contextual, and richly archival. A coherent narrative emerges from these episodes. But they also furnish a comparative understanding of how personal memory was understood in different contexts and periods. The study as a whole will be a fine-grained social-historical account quite new for this subject that examines how different constituencies have staked claims and defended the legitimacy of their authority. It ventures into the courtroom, the psychological laboratory, the psychiatric consulting room, and popular media. Since memory debates constituted a field in which the lay public could claim to have intuitive knowledge, the potential of this history to deliver broader understandings of the fate of scientific expertise in the modern era is especially promising. And an unusually diverse range of communities of experts psychologists, physicians, psychoanalysts, surgeons, and others laid claim to memory as the object of their expertise. The history of memory can thus provide a good case through which we can interrogate the relationship between expert communities, and between them and the public. Intellectual merit : The project has intrinsic value in the path it will chart through a major area that has not as yet received significant scholarship. Second, it develops a new understanding of the relationship between science and media as an examination of the reciprocal construction of meaning in science and in media. Third, it develops a new perspective on the role of science in the law, in an area that has drawn less scholarship than it deserves. Broader impacts : This study should be of interest beyond the academic community, because its perspective on the relationship between lay and expert beliefs will enhance our understanding of how modern society, and its representatives -- juries -- appraise witness testimony, still the archetypal form of evidence in criminal trials. The result of this research will be disseminated not only in scholarly journals but also in a book addressed to both specialist and lay audiences.
