 The philosophy of history must pay attention to the nexus of experience, memory, and history. There is no single “Civil Rights era” experience or “Great Depression” experience; instead, historians must consider a wide range of sources and evidence, including oral histories, first-person accounts, photographs, and other traces of the human experience of the time to allow them to discern both variation and some degree of thematicization of memory and identity in the periods they study. Second, attention to history and memory highlights the amount of human and individual agency involved in memory. Memories must be created; agents must find frameworks within which to understand their moments of historical experience. Museums and monuments curate historical memories — often with biases of their own. A third and equally important point is the fact that memories become part of the political mobilization possibilities that exist for a group. Groups find their collective identities through shared understandings of the past; and these shared understandings provide a basis for future collective action. Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1984-1988) sheds profound light on the profound relations that extend among memory, identity, narrative, and history.