Historical-defined Autobiographical Periods: Their Origins and Implications
Norman R. Brown
University of Alberta

This presentation will consist of three sections. First, I review evidence indicating that historically-significant public events sometimes create historically-defined autobiographical periods (H-DAPs), and argue that this happens only when external events bring about wide-spread, profound and enduring changes in the fabric of daily life. The remaining sections address the implications of these claims. In the second section, I focus on collective memory and consider the possibility that H-DAP formation predicts the intergenerational transmission of the precipitating events and that the absence of H-DAPs predicts the opposite. In the third section, I discuss the theoretical implications of this research for a general understanding of personal memory. In particular, I contend that autobiographical memory is organized in a way that reflects marked changes in the fabric of daily life (FoDL). Typically, these FoDL transitions occur at the level of the indivual, but they can also occur at the level of the group. On this view, standard lifetime periods are associated with FoDL transitions at the individual level, and H-DAPs are associated with FoDL transitions at the group level.