Contested Commemoration in U.S. History
Contested Commemoration in U.S. History

Author: Klara Stephanie Szlezák

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-25

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1000702227

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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.

Contested Sites
Contested Sites

Author: Paul A. Pickering

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1351948970

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The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a new phenomenon in public monuments and civic ornamentation. Whereas in former times public statuary had customarily been reserved for 'warriors and statesmen, kings and rulers of men', a new trend was emerging for towns to commemorate their own citizens. As the subjects immortalised in stone and bronze broadened beyond the traditional ruling classes to include radicals and reformers, it necessitated a corresponding widening of the language and understanding of public statuary. Contested Sites explores the role of these commemorations in radical public life in Britain. Despite recent advances in the understanding of the importance of symbols in public discourse, political monuments have received little attention from historians. This is to be regretted, for commemorations are statements of public identity and memory that have their politics; they are 'embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten)'. Examining monuments, plaques and tombstones commemorating a variety of popular movements and reforming individuals, the contributions in Contested Sites reveal the relations that went into the making of public memory in modern Britain and its radical tradition.

Cities of the Dead
Cities of the Dead

Author: William A. Blair

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-01-20

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0807876232

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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.

Contesting Commemoration
Contesting Commemoration

Author: Jack D. Noe

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-10-06

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0807176168

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In Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South, Jack Noe examines identity and nationalism in the post–Civil War South through the lens of commemorative activity, namely Independence Day celebrations and the Centennial of 1876. Both events presented opportunities for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Americans. The often colorful and engaging discourse surrounding these observances provides a fascinating portrait of this fractured moment in the development of American nationalism.

Contested Commemorations
Contested Commemorations

Author: Benjamin Ziemann

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1107028892

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An innovative study of remembrance in Weimar Germany and how war experiences and memories were transformed along political lines.

Commemorations
Commemorations

Author: John R. Gillis

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0691186650

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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).

A Date Which Will Live
A Date Which Will Live

Author: Emily S. Rosenberg

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2003-08-25

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780822332060

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How Pearl Harbor has been written about, thought of, and manipulated in American culture.

The "Good War" in American Memory
The

Author: John Bodnar

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1421400022

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The “Good War” in American Memory dispels the long-held myth that Americans forged an agreement on why they had to fight in World War II. John Bodnar's sociocultural examination of the vast public debate that took place in the United States over the war's meaning reveals that the idea of the "good war" was highly contested. Bodnar's comprehensive study of the disagreements that marked the American remembrance of World War II in the six decades following its end draws on an array of sources: fiction and nonfiction, movies, theater, and public monuments. He identifies alternative strands of memory—tragic and brutal versus heroic and virtuous—and reconstructs controversies involving veterans, minorities, and memorials. In building this narrative, Bodnar shows how the idealism of President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms was lost in the public commemoration of World War II, how the war's memory became intertwined in the larger discussion over American national identity, and how it only came to be known as the "good war" many years after its conclusion.

A European Memory?
A European Memory?

Author: Małgorzata Pakier

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0857454307

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An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand why the grand design of a United Europe--with a common foreign policy and market yet enough diversity to allow for cultural and social differences--was overwhelmingly turned down by its citizens. The authors argue that this rejection of the European constitution was to a certain extent a challenge to the current historical grounding used for further integration and further demonstrates the lack of understanding by European bureaucrats of the historical complexity and divisiveness of Europe's past. A critical European history is therefore urgently needed to confront and re-imagine Europe, not as a harmonious continent but as the outcome of violent and bloody conflicts, both within Europe as well as with its Others. As the authors show, these dark shadows of Europe's past must be integrated, and the fact that memories of Europe are contested must be accepted if any new attempts at a United Europe are to be successful.

Public in Public History
Public in Public History

Author: Joanna Wojdon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1000412296

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Public in Public History presents international research on the role of the public in public history: the ways people perceive, respond to and influence history-related institutions, events, services and products that deal with the past. The book addresses theoretical reflections on the public, or multiple publics, and their role in public history, and empirical analyses of the publics’ active responses to and impact on existing forms of public history. Special attention is also paid to digital public history, which facilitates the double role of the public—as both recipient and creator of public history. With a multinational author team, the book is based on various national, but also international, experiences and academic traditions; each chapter goes beyond national cases to look transnationally. The narratives built around their cases deal with issues such as arranging a museum exhibition, managing a history-related website, analyzing readers’ comments or involving non-professional public as oral history researchers. With sections focusing on research, commemorations, museums and the digital world, this is the perfect collection for anyone interested in what the public means in public history.