War Monuments, Museums and Library Collections of 20th Century Conflicts
War Monuments, Museums and Library Collections of 20th Century Conflicts

Author: Steve Rajtar

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-07-11

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1476612374

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This unique state-by-state directory covers monuments, memorials, museums, markers, statues and library collections that relate to the veterans, weapons, vehicles, airplanes, victims or any other aspect of war in which the United States participated. While a site may have been created before 1900 (such as a fort), there must be some operational or historical tie to a twentieth century conflict to be included here. General collections, such as museums of aviation, are included if they house materials related to a twentieth century conflict. The coverage is so thorough that statues honoring veterans of the Civil War appear if veterans of later wars are on their rosters of honorees. Another example of the comprehensiveness of this compilation is in the inclusion of memorials to victims of war such as the Holocaust Museum in Houston, Texas. For each site, the following information is given: street address, phone number, website and email address (if applicable), days and hours of operation, admission fees, other necessary information, and a brief description of the site.

Tourists of History
Tourists of History

Author: Marita Sturken

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0822390515

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In Tourists of History, the cultural critic Marita Sturken argues that over the past two decades, Americans have responded to national trauma through consumerism, kitsch sentiment, and tourist practices in ways that reveal a tenacious investment in the idea of America’s innocence. Sturken investigates the consumerism that followed from the September 11th attacks; the contentious, ongoing debates about memorials and celebrity-architect designed buildings at Ground Zero; and two outcomes of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City: the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the execution of Timothy McVeigh. Sturken contends that a consumer culture of comfort objects such as World Trade Center snow globes, FDNY teddy bears, and Oklahoma City Memorial t-shirts and branded water, as well as reenactments of traumatic events in memorial and architectural designs, enables a national tendency to see U.S. culture as distant from both history and world politics. A kitsch comfort culture contributes to a “tourist” relationship to history: Americans can feel good about visiting and buying souvenirs at sites of national mourning without having to engage with the economic, social, and political causes of the violent events. While arguing for the importance of remembering tragic losses of life, Sturken is urging attention to a dangerous confluence—of memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch—that promulgates fear to sell safety, offers prepackaged emotion at the expense of critical thought, contains alternative politics, and facilitates public acquiescence in the federal government’s repressive measures at home and its aggressive political and military policies abroad.