Recovering social memories from the past: the 1884 novelRamonaand tourist practices in turn‐of‐the‐century southern California

Scholars studying social memory have identified a priority for future work: using the study of documented social memories to understand constructions of the past and social identities in the present. Recovering such lived, individual engagements with social memory is challenging when those engaging the memory are deceased, yet that is what this article attempts to do: Through fine‐grained study of archival traces, I explore the lived practices of tourists in an attempt to understand how the immensely popular 1884 novel Ramona changed the way people thought about southern California's past, creating a new, Ramona‐inspired social memory for the region. In so doing I suggest that those interested in recovering social memories (like these) from the past use such detailed analysis, paying close attention to even the tiniest of details.