In French theorist, Pierre Nora’s significant description of the difference between the mythical formation of memory and the actual position of previous events, such as historical sites and historical objects, Nora defines how human society is haunted by memory as well as history. Indeed, history becomes manipulated by memory to become something else and thus "facts" of history are mostly transferals of actual historic events into cultural memory which transforms the events of the past into copies of themselves that are used in order to describe and define the present. Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire (place of memory) describes the artificial landscape of the modern (re)creation of national and cultural memory. The place of memory is contrasted with milieux de memoire (environments of memory) that describes the mythical relics of traditional cultures. The place of memory, fittingly describes the cultural appropriation of history into a mythic space of cultural memory. Thus the lieux de memoire is a cultural surrogation of history into the imagined realm of cultural identity. As Nora describes this replacement of environments of memory by places of memory: "moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, nor yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded." p. 12 History is appropriated and re-appropriated beyond recognition into the lieux de memoire, and thus it is used for the political and cultural aims of a society. History becomes transformed through memory into something else. Nora’s work and discussion of memory has been influential for cultural and historical theorists, social scientists, and literary academic community. The work is an essential source for modern research on national and cultural studies.