Between 1891 and 1930 Montreal was a bilingual and increasingly multicultural city. Its "two majorities" struggled to negotiate and commemorate their respective memories in the public spaces of the city, using historic monuments to stake a claim to specific places, streets, and neighbourhoods. In Making Public Pasts Alan Gordon argues that the contest was fundamentally ideological, a competition between major social groups to shape perceptions of history and frame the historical consciousness of individuals.

Gordon shows that while individual memory is crucial to establishing and maintaining identity, public memory is contested terrain - official customs and traditions, monuments, historic sites, and the celebration of anniversaries and festivals serve to order individual and collective perceptions of the past. Public memory is therefore the product of competitions and ideas about the past that are fashioned in a public sphere and speak primarily about structures of power. It conscripts historical events in a bid to guide shared memories into a coherent narrative that helps individuals negotiate their place in broader collective identities.

The contest over public memories involves an exclusiveness that packages "others" according to the ideological preferences of the dominant cultures. Gordon shows that in Montreal ethnic, class, and gender voices strove to stake their own claims to legitimacy. Rather than acknowledging a single past, Montreal's many publics made and celebrated many public memories.