Contested Commemoration In U S History
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Contested Commemoration in U.S. History
Against the backdrop of two recent socio-political developments—the shift from the Obama to the Trump administration and the surge in nationalist and populist sentiment that ushered in the current administration—Contested Commemoration in U.S. History presents eleven essays focused on practices of remembering contested events in America’s national history. This edited volume contains fresh interpretations of public history and collective memory that explore the evolving relationship between the U.S. and its past. The individual chapters investigate efforts to memorialize events or interrogate instances of historical sanitization at the expense of less partial representations that would include other perspectives. The primary source material and geography covered is extensive; contributors use historic sites and monuments, photographs, memoirs, textbooks, periodicals, music, and film to discuss the periods from colonial America, through the Revolutionary and Civil Wars up until the Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, and Cold War, to explore how the commemoration of those eras resonates in the twenty-first century. Through a range of commemoration media and primary sources, the authors illuminate themes and arguments that are indispensable to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in Public History and American Studies more broadly.
Cities of the Dead
Author: William A. Blair
language: en
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Release Date: 2011-01-20
Exploring the history of Civil War commemorations from both sides of the color line, William Blair places the development of memorial holidays, Emancipation Day celebrations, and other remembrances in the context of Reconstruction politics and race relations in the South. His grassroots examination of these civic rituals demonstrates that the politics of commemoration remained far more contentious than has been previously acknowledged. Commemorations by ex-Confederates were intended at first to maintain a separate identity from the U.S. government, Blair argues, not as a vehicle for promoting sectional healing. The burial grounds of fallen heroes, known as Cities of the Dead, often became contested ground, especially for Confederate women who were opposed to Reconstruction. And until the turn of the century, African Americans used freedom celebrations to lobby for greater political power and tried to create a national holiday to recognize emancipation. Blair's analysis shows that some festive occasions that we celebrate even today have a divisive and sometimes violent past as various groups with conflicting political agendas attempted to define the meaning of the Civil War.
Commemorations
Author: John R. Gillis
language: en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date: 1996-10-06
Memory is as central to modern politics as politics is central to modern memory. We are so accustomed to living in a forest of monuments, to having the past represented to us through museums, historic sites, and public sculpture, that we easily lose sight of the recent origins and diverse meanings of these uniquely modern phenomena. In this volume, leading historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers explore the relationship between collective memory and national identity in diverse cultures throughout history. Placing commemorations in their historical settings, the contributors disclose the contested nature of these monuments by showing how groups and individuals struggle to shape the past to their own ends. The volume is introduced by John Gillis's broad overview of the development of public memory in relation to the history of the nation-state. Other contributions address the usefulness of identity as a cross-cultural concept (Richard Handler), the connection between identity, heritage, and history (David Lowenthal), national memory in early modern England (David Cressy), commemoration in Cleveland (John Bodnar), the museum and the politics of social control in modern Iraq (Eric Davis), invented tradition and collective memory in Israel (Yael Zerubavel), black emancipation and the civil war monument (Kirk Savage), memory and naming in the Great War (Thomas Laqueur), American commemoration of World War I (Kurt Piehler), art, commerce, and the production of memory in France after World War I (Daniel Sherman), historic preservation in twentieth-century Germany (Rudy Koshar), the struggle over French identity in the early twentieth century (Herman Lebovics), and the commemoration of concentration camps in the new Germany (Claudia Koonz).