There is a move across the country to expand traditional memory practices, and as a result, new forms of commemoration are emerging. Instead of the traditional depiction of one individual, or a great man approach to commemoration, this book illuminates five commemorative sites that embrace diversity and challenge conventional forms of commemoration.
During times of cultural and social change, there are challenges to decorum, and the U.S. commemorative landscape is at the center of these changes. Lately, there has been a push to eliminate Confederate statues and memorials and to incorporate women, people of color, and the negative episodes of U.S. history into the commemorative landscape.
Here, senior scholar Teresa Bergman investigates this new direction of commemoration in the U.S., and particularly in the messages communicated at sites that challenge traditional commemorative practices. Bergman looks at five sites: the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Memorial, the Women's Rights Pioneers Memorial in Central Park, the Anthracite Miners Museum and Coal Mine tour and the Eckley Mining Village, and the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial.
The U.S. commemorative landscape is changing, and it is important to take note of this because it reveals many of the assumptions concerning civic and national duty, and patriotism. One of the main challenges with incorporating diversity into commemoration is resisting a universalizing depiction of women, people of color, working class people, and LGBTQ persons; and incorporating the effects of race, economic class, and gender orientation in these representations. Another challenge is refraining from celebratory commemoration in order to recognize the darker chapters of U.S. history that have been critical to the country's development. Each site chosen for analysis in this book engages more or less successfully with the politics of its time, but questions remain for how we define commemoration and who and what gets commemorated.
This book adds to the considerable research on commemoration by providing five case studies of locations that explore new directions in commemoration and embrace diversity and representation of those populations traditionally left out of America's national commemorative landscape.