Intellectual historian Michael S. Roth has spent more than two decades exploring the way we make meaning out of the past. This collection features his most influential essays, in which he uses psychoanalysis to build a richer understanding of history, and then takes a more expansive conception of history to decode the cultural construction of memory. His collection consists of five sections. The first examines the development in nineteenth-century France of professional criteria for diagnosing memory disorders-criteria that signal fundamental changes in the understanding of pr.