A multidisciplinary work, Memory of the Modern examines stock markets, tango dancers, vagabond murderers, neurology, monument destruction, and colonial policies to document how individuals and institutions shaped memory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wonderfully written, the book studies these diverse "memory-sites" to show how memory and history are fought over, shaped, and put to personal and ideological use.
Matsuda's conceptual approach opens fresh ways of seeing the importance of writing and the democratized print culture of the late nineteenth century. It also casts new light of understanding on the expansion of state records and files (the memory of state"). And he fruitfully brings his framework to bear on the functions of such new "memory machines" as photography and cinema..