The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants--and in particular Presbyterians--tried to repress for more than two centuries discomforting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798.

By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, which are rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing.

Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative examples are offered and demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories were secreted.