Introduction

Every day dozens of noteworthy events are reported in newspapers, on television, and in radio broadcasts. Depending on your reading, viewing, and listening habits, you may be exposed to several different descriptions of the same event over the course of a single day, or you may have to endure hearing the same version repeated a number of times. Further, these events may come up again in conversation and as the topics of magazine articles or film documentaries. The point is that exposure to current events is a common, almost unavoidable part of our daily experience and that information concerning these events, extracted from the media and from our interactions with others, is learned in the context of our own lives.

In this chapter we explore how the knowledge people have of recent history (public memories) is linked to their knowledge of their lives (personal or autobiographical memories). We expect a given public memory to be a blend of facts about the public circumstances in which the event occurred and facts about the personal matrix in which that information was acquired.