"Preservation and National Memory" Reading Blog

This week's readings have been good food for thought for me.

Doss's Memorial Mania is an impressive book that takes a really interesting look at the culture of commemoration that has sprung up in modern America, a tradition she traces to the period after the Civil War. Doss argues that memorials, statues, and the like, are personal ways for people to express their own preferred versions of a national collective memory and disputed political narratives. This mania surrounding the commemoration of both the big and the small, the happy and the sad, has allowed for the plurality of social, cultural, and political narratives that can be seen throughout the country. In a somewhat opposite phenomenon, Mires's book Independence Hall explains how competing narratives have all been condensed, or rather covered up, with one particular way of remembering the site of Independence Hall. It appears that in our national scramble to remember, it can be just as easy to forget.

I agree with the main points of Doss's arguments, but I wish to make a broader connection here to other ideas we've talked about. Doss seems to emphasize the importance of the materiality and narrative of such memorials, and to me this speaks to the arguments I have made before, referring to Presence of the Past, that people seem most connected to (or in this case most willing to accept the interpretation of) something that is material. My reading of Rosenzweig and Thelen informed my opinion that people trust museums because museums have stuff. People connect with what they can touch (or could touch if the objects weren't housed in exhibit cases) and these memorials, huge hulking pieces of stone that many of them are, fulfill that need to touch a part of history. Even if most of these memorials aren't actually historic themselves.

The other two readings for this week: Crane's chapter on time, memory, and museums as well as Glassberg's essay on public history and memory, allow for even more discussion on the function of memory in the historical process. I think these pieces can augment our understanding of the larger claims that the books from this week are making. Crane's work seems to me, at least, to back up my idea about the importance of materiality in the contention of memory and history. And Glassberg has given us a helpful blueprint of how to work through these issues as he explores the ways public history can remedy the ills of collective memory.