Memorializing the past often focuses on acts of resiliency, but commemoration can be contentious. This session offers five examples from the modern British or Irish experience concerning efforts to commemorate and preserve a historically significant event or site. These case studies consider the relationships between memory and dominant narrative, preservation and urban development, and litigious stewardship of commemoration. Each examines the memory of a polemical moment of resiliency. PhD candidate Rachel Oppenheimer (History, Carnegie Mellon University) will present on memory of the prison protests following the 1976 revocation of Special Category status in Northern Ireland. Dr. Fiona Coffey (Theatre Arts, Tufts University) will focus on theatrical performances at Belfast’s Crumlin Road prison, where the stage attempted to convert a place of hopeless despair into an imaginative space. PhD candidate Sarah Mass (History, University of Michigan) will consider the preservation campaign to save Chesterfield Market from redevelopment in the 1970s and the symbolism of traditional markets as a social leveler. PhD candidate David Strittmatter (History, University at Buffalo) will detail the development of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre site and Manchester’s failure to erect a significant memorial to the event. Finally, PhD candidate Steve Santelli (History, West Virginia University) will consider the Anglo-American special relationship and the joint preservation effort of Sulgrave Manor, the ancestral home of the Washington family. Together, these papers conceptualize various aspects of historical consciousness—both of historical actors and today’s historians—and how Britain and Ireland conceives of its heritage sites and historic events.