Jill A. Edy seeks to answer a difficult question: How do Americans construct a “collective” memory—as opposed to individual memories—of past events through the news media? Edy focuses her analysis on two case studies: the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. She chose these cases because they were complicated, significant, newsworthy events when they occurred and each case became a basis of comparison for contemporary events. In 1992, South Central Los Angeles, including Watts, erupted into riots again after the acquittal of police officers who had beaten motorist Rodney King, and in 1996, the Democratic Party once again held its national convention in Chicago.

Edy uses multiple forms of media in her analysis. She uses Time and Newsweek to analyze contemporaneous coverage of the 1965 riots and the 1968 convention. To understand how the media constructed collective memory over the following decades, she analyzes three newspapers in detail—the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times, the last of which is used as a surrogate for national news coverage.

The author first provides the reader with a summary of the original events, listing the undisputed “facts” of the two cases and being careful not to place her own interpretation of those facts into this part of the narrative. She then describes the contemporaneous coverage from the newsmagazines, demonstrating that the news reporters had no way of understanding why the events unfolded. In fact, the events inside the 1968 Democratic National Convention were reported separately, as though divorced from the events occurring outside. Similarly, coverage of the Watts riots allows observers to impose a variety of competing frames on the events—poverty, joblessness, and racial unrest—into the contemporaneous coverage.

Next, Edy examines how the public ritual of an investigation helps to frame these events for coming generations. She compares the McCone Commission, which investigated the root causes of the Watts riots, with the Walker Report, issued after the 1968 Democratic National Convention. She argues that the McCone Commission did not attempt to affix blame as much as it listened to competing explanations of the violence and exonerated the longtime residents of the African American community of Los Angeles. The Walker Report attempted to affix blame for the unrest on demonstrators and police alike, and its conclusions were rejected by Mayor Richard Daley and others involved in the events in Chicago. Thus, Edy concludes, the collective memory of the Watts riots and the 1968 convention was not shaped by any official body. Any collective memory, consequently, had to be shaped by the news media.

Edy then uses indices and key word searches to determine how many times the Watts riots or the 1968 Democratic Convention were mentioned annually in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (until 1992 for the Watts riots and 1996 for the Chicago convention). She finds that there are frequent mentions of both events in the newspapers. They occur in obituaries of individuals who participated in either event, in retrospectives of the events on major anniversaries, or simply as metaphors. This is the most fascinating part of her analysis, where she demonstrates how the competing frames eventually dissolve into one common explanation: The Watts riots are framed as an outcry against urban poverty and the failure of the Great Society, and the demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic Convention express opposition to the Vietnam War. Competing frames—including Watts as a riot about racial tensions caused by African American migrants from the South, or representations of the other counterculture movements taking part in the Chicago clashes—are simply missing. Another key finding is that the collective memory of the Democratic Convention constructed by the Chicago Tribune differs from those adopted by other newspapers. The Tribune consistently characterizes the unrest as the fault of the demonstrators and exonerates the police. Only when the 1996 Democratic Convention again comes to Chicago does the Chicago Tribune begin to revise its frame to coincide with the interpretations of the New York Times and other newspapers.

Edy concludes her work by calling to mind Santayana's oft-quoted phrase, “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” She argues that Santayana's caution implies that there is but one lesson to learn from the past. Her case studies demonstrate that the “lessons of the past” include not only remembering discrete events but also attaching particular meanings to those events and forgetting other interpretations of them. She then discusses how collective memory of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks may be shaped over time.

Unfortunately, Edy overstates her conclusions to some extent, largely because she does not adequately justify her methodology. For instance, she uses the New York Times as the sole representative of national media coverage, stating, as many others have, that it is used as a touchstone for editors and producers in other national outlets. However, in so doing, she ignores a growing literature that finds that the New York Times is not a reliable surrogate for national media coverage. Consequently, conclusions about the differences between local and national coverage may be overstated; these differences may only apply between the New York Times and the Tribune or Los Angeles Times, however. Nor does Edy include television news coverage in her analysis. She has practical reasons for not doing so; yet she does not explore adequately whether and how this decision might influence her conclusions, especially given the importance of images to the construction of individual and collective memory. Along the same lines, she does not mention the development of the Internet, and whether and how this new medium may influence the construction of memory. Finally, she does not discuss how the materials were coded or how many coders were used. If she alone is responsible for classification and interpretation, she should have mentioned this and discussed the ramifications of this approach as well.

These concerns aside, Edy's short book is extremely well written and her work is well grounded in the literatures of communication and political science. As such, the work is an excellent resource for scholars interested in political communication, framing, media studies, and social history. It makes a significant contribution to our collective understanding of social movements and media coverage of them.