American Relics And The Politics Of Public Memory

Author : Matthew Dennis
Publisher : Public History in Historical P
ISBN 13 : 9781625347114
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory written by Matthew Dennis and published by Public History in Historical P. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gold epaulettes that George Washington wore into battle. A Union soldier's bloody shirt in the wake of the Civil War. A crushed wristwatch after the 9/11 attacks. The bullet-riddled door of the Pulse nightclub. Volatile and shape-shifting, relics have long played a role in memorializing the American past, acting as physical reminders of hard-won battles, mass tragedies, and political triumphs. Surveying the expanse of U.S. history, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory shows how these objects have articulated glory, courage, and national greatness as well as horror, defeat, and oppression. While relics mostly signified heroism in the nation's early years, increasingly, they have acquired a new purpose--commemorating victimhood. The atrocious artifacts of lynching and the looted remains of Native American graves were later transformed into shameful things, exposing ongoing racial violence and advancing calls for equality and civil rights. Matthew Dennis pursues this history of fraught public objects and assesses the emergence of new venues of memorialization, such as virtual and digital spaces. Through it all, relics continue to fundamentally ground and shape U.S. public memory in its uncertain present and future.

Author : Alea Henle
Publisher : Public History in Historical P
ISBN 13 : 9781625344984
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rescued from Oblivion written by Alea Henle and published by Public History in Historical P. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1791, a group of elite Bostonian men established the first historical society in the nation. Within sixty years, the number of local history organizations had increased exponentially, with states and territories from Maine to Louisiana and Georgia to Minnesota boasting collections of their own. With in-depth research and an expansive scope, Rescued from Oblivion offers a vital account of the formation of historical culture and consciousness in the early United States, re-centering in the record groups long marginalized from the national memory. As Alea Henle demonstrates, these societies laid the groundwork for professional practices that are still embraced today: collection policies, distinctions between preservation of textual and nontextual artifacts, publication programs, historical rituals and commemorations, reconciliation of scholarly and popular approaches, and more. At the same time, officers of these early societies faced challenges to their historical authority from communities interested in preserving a broader range of materials and documenting more inclusive histories, including fellow members, popular historians, white women, and peoples of color.

Author : Katherine A. Foss
Publisher : UMass + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1613767781
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Constructing the Outbreak written by Katherine A. Foss and published by UMass + ORM. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When an epidemic strikes, media outlets are central to how an outbreak is framed and understood. While reporters construct stories intended to inform the public and convey essential information from doctors and politicians, news narratives also serve as historical records, capturing sentiments, responses, and fears throughout the course of the epidemic. Constructing the Outbreak demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message. Analyzing seven epidemics spanning more than two hundred years—from Boston's smallpox epidemic and Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in the eighteenth century to outbreaks of diphtheria, influenza, and typhoid in the early twentieth century—Katherine A. Foss discusses how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks. Each case study highlights facets of this interplay, delving into topics such as colonization, tourism, war, and politics. Through this investigation into what has been preserved and forgotten in the collective memory of disease, Foss sheds light on current health care debates, like vaccine hesitancy.

Author : Martha K. Norkunas
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791414842
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Politics of Public Memory written by Martha K. Norkunas and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1993-07-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines American public culture and the means by which communities in the U.S. reconstruct the past and reinterpret the present in the development of tourism. Norkunas shows how public culture is not confined to just museums or monuments, but can be constructed on many different levels and in different settings, such as community ethnicity, natural setting (environment), literary landscape, and history. In her case study of Monterey, the author explores the particular ideologies that prompt the community to represent itself in tourism, and that also act to legitimate the current social structure.

Author : Benjamin Hufbauer
Publisher : CultureAmerica
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Presidential Temples written by Benjamin Hufbauer and published by CultureAmerica. This book was released on 2005 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the visual and material cultures of presidential commemoration--memorials and monuments, libraries and archives--and the problematic ways in which presidents themselves have largely taken over their own commemoration. The author sees these various commemorative sites as playing a key role in the construction of our collective political and cultural self-images and as another sign of our preoccupation with celebrity culture. Ultimately, he contends, these presidential temples reflect not only our civil religion but also the extraordinary expansion of executive authority--and presidential self-commemoration--since FDR.

Author : Denise D. Meringolo
Publisher : Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN 13 : 1558499407
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks written by Denise D. Meringolo and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapid expansion of the field of public history since the 1970s has led many to believe that it is a relatively new profession. In this book, Denise D. Meringolo shows that the roots of public history actually reach back to the nineteenth century, when the federal government entered into the work of collecting and preserving the nation's natural and cultural resources. Yet it was not until the emergence of the education-oriented National Park Service history program in the 1920s and 1930s that public history found an institutional home. Even then, tensions between administrators in Washington and practitioners on the ground at National Parks, monuments, and museums continued to redefine the scope and substance of the field. The process of definition persists to this day as public historians establish a growing presence in major universities throughout the United States and abroad. Book jacket.

Author : Seth C. Bruggeman
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1442279206
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Commemoration written by Seth C. Bruggeman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commemoration: The American Association for State and Local History Guide serves as a handbook for historic site managers, heritage professionals, and all manner of public historians who contend daily with the ground-level complexities of commemoration. Its fourteen short essays are intended as tools for practitioners, students, and anyone else confronted with common problems in commemorative practice today. Of particular concern are strategies for expanding commemoration across the panoply of American identities, confronting tragedy and difficult pasts, and doing responsible work in the face of persistent economic and political turmoil. A special afterword explores the role of emotion in modern commemoration and what it suggests about possibilities for engaging new audiences.

Author : Andrew Burstein
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807178039
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rip Van Winkle’s Republic written by Andrew Burstein and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2022-09-28 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two centuries ago, native New Yorker Washington Irving exploded onto the literary scene of Europe with the publication of his breakout collection of stories, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Published in England and America in 1819–1820, and universally praised for its inventive characters and soul-searching qualities, including the immortal tales “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the volume enjoyed remarkable transatlantic success, allowing Irving to become the first of his nation to support himself as a professional author. In this distinctive collection, historians and literary scholars come together to reassess Irving’s imaginative world and complex cultural legacy. Alternately a satirist and a nostalgia merchant, Irving was ever absorbed in reconstituting a lost past, which the volume dubs “Rip Van Winkle’s Republic.” The assembled scholars explore issues of Anglo-American culture, the power of imagery, race, and the treatment of time and history in Irving’s vast body of literature, as well as his status as a bibliophile, an antiquarian, and a prominent figure in an age of literary celebrity. Edited by acclaimed historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Rip Van Winkle’s Republic marks a rediscovery of this marvelous author of social satire and fabled tales of the past.

Author : Matthew Dennis
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501723707
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Red, White, and Blue Letter Days written by Matthew Dennis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Columbus Day, Labor Day, Martin Luther King's Birthday, and other celebrations matter to Americans and reflect the state of American local and national politics. Commemorations of cataclysmic events and light, apparently trivial observances mirror American political and cultural life. Both reveal much about the material conditions of the United States and its citizens' identities, historical consciousness, and political attitudes. Lying dormant within these festivals is the potential for political consequence, controversy, even transformation. American political fetes remain works in progress, as Americans use historical celebrations as occasions to reinvent themselves and their nation, often with surprising results. In six engaging chapters 'assaying particular political holidays over the course of their histories, Red, White, and Blue Letter Days examines how Americans have shaped and been shaped by their calendar. Matthew Dennis explores this vast political and cultural terrain, charting how Americans defined their identities through celebration. Independence Day invited African Americans to demand the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence, for example, just as Columbus Day—celebrating the Italian, Catholic explorer—helped immigrants proclaim their legitimacy as Americans. Native Americans too could use public holidays, such as Thanksgiving or Veterans Day, to express dissent or demonstrate their claims to citizenship. Merchants and advertisers colonized the American calendar, moving in to sell their products by linking them, often tenuously, with holiday occasions or casting consumption as a patriotic act.

Author : Tammy Gordon
Publisher : Public History in Historical P
ISBN 13 : 9781625345318
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mass Production of Memory written by Tammy Gordon and published by Public History in Historical P. This book was released on 2020-11-27 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company offered the first portable camera that allowed users to conveniently take photos, using leisure travel as a primary marketing feature to promote it. The combination of portability, ease of use, and mass advertising fed into a national trend of popular photography that drew on Americans' increasing mobility and leisure time. The Kodak Company and the first generation of tourist photographers established new standards for personal archiving that amplified the individual's role in authoring the national narrative. But not everyone had equal access to travel and tourism, and many members of the African American, Native American, and gay and lesbian communities used the camera to counter the racism, homophobia, and classism that shaped public spaces. In this groundbreaking history, Tammy S. Gordon tells the story of the camera's emerging centrality in leisure travel across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its role in "the mass production of memory," a process in which users crafted a visual archive attesting to their experiences, values, and circumstances, setting the stage for the customizable visual culture of the digital age.