Objects have always been and continue to be carriers of personal and communal memories. Although the significance of objects for personal and collective memory is not in any way a phenomenon of recent times, objects of remembrance have proliferated since the eighteenth century, speaking to a widely felt desire for tangible markers of both fleeting personal experiences and significant public events. Over the same period, new production processes and technologies and the expansion of national and international markets have made such objects more widely and cheaply available than ever before.
The ten essays in issue 27 of The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts offer an interdisciplinary approach to objects of remembrance during the modern era. The essays address the particular notions and experiences of time that called forth a demand for souvenirs, postcards, photograph albums, clothing, and a wide variety of other objects that could serve as devices of memory. They investigate the roles such items played in individual lives and larger communities, and the strategies that artists, designers, and manufacturers used to produce objects that could serve these functions.
