Contested Commemoration in U.s. History: Diverging Public Interpretations

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.

Melissa M. Bender is a senior lecturer and the associate director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of California, Davis. Her monograph, Dysfunctional Family Values: Nurturing the Neoliberal Self in U.S. Memoir, will be published in 2020. Her research interests include visual and material rhetoric, writing studies, and American cultural studies.

Klara Stephanie Szlezák is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in American Studies at the University of Passau, Germany. She is the author of "Canonized in History": Literary Tourism and 19th-Century Writers’ Houses in New England. Her research interests include museum studies, visual culture studies, and the history of immigration.