With a broad, interdisciplinary command of the subject, Patrick H. Hutton considers the ideas of philosophers, poets, and historians, focusing especially on the work of Giambattista Vico, Maurice Halbwachs, Philippe Ariès, and Michel Foucault. He surveys such questions as the roots of contemporary historical interest in the memory topic, the eternal paradox of repetition and recollection as moments of memory, the ways in which the art of memory has been refashioned to serce the needs of the modern age and becomes integrated into historical thinking, and historians' changing attitudes toward the historiographical tradition of scholarship on the French Revolution.