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Historical memory, or collective memory, refers to the fluid way by which groups of people create and then identify with specific narratives about historical periods or events, sometimes based on present circumstances. Historical memory involves a collection of familial memory, religious memory, and national memory.

Historical memory is a vindication of the past. Historical awareness uses procedures to construct temporality and change-continuity in a process that goes from the past to the future.

"History" refers to the study of past events, while "historical memory" refers to how people remember and interpret those past events. In other words, history is the objective record of what happened in the past, based on evidence like documents, artefacts, and other sources.

"The concept of “historical memory,” often expressed as “collective memory,” “social memory,” or for political scientists, “the politics of memory,” refers to the ways in which groups, collectivities, and nations construct and identify with particular narratives about historical periods or events.

Collective memories are shared representations of a group's past based on a common identity.

In short, historians study memory because it has been such an important modern instrument of power. And what historians studying memory have come to understand is simply that the process by which societies or nations remember collectively itself has a history.