History develops like a river as it cuts a channel, a collective memory.

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It has become a marker of local history and a medium for transferring collective memory from one generation to another.

UNESCO: Culture

He called it the phonograph, and it took a long time for librarians to figure out that the echoes of speech and music that Edison and his successors etched on discs were as important a part of our collective memory as the words that Johannes Gutenberg and his successors printed on paper.

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Once widely mocked for its sterility and ugliness, it has now become, in the collective memory of America, a hallowed gravesite for the thousands of people who died there--and a potent emblem of commerce, bowed but unbeaten.

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But also lurking back there is the collective memory that he actively participated in a functioning government for a while.

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Regional and national recognition of oral traditions on a continent where they play a vital role is a perfect example of how culture can defend the collective memory and contribute to dialogue and development.

UNESCO: 18_eng

Does it matter that our collective memory locks the two men together in a mythic embrace?

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Yet Gray's "Elegy" also rose above the ghetto of a genre, expressing universal ideas in lines that worked their way into collective memory.

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Short term credit markets, paranoid and nervous given recent collective memory of the implosion that was 2008, have already begun to anticipate a possible default.

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But the sheer magnitude of the human tragedy of the second world war puts it in a class of its own, and its relative closeness to the present day makes claims on the collective memory that more remote horrors cannot.

ECONOMIST: The second world war