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A champion of school integration lacked a plaque until kids spoke up

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A champion of school integration lacked a plaque until kids spoke up

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https://newsela.com/read/barbara-johns-school-integration/id/2001019333/

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Newsela - A champion of school integration lacked a plaque until kids spoke up

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A history buff who sent her students on scavenger hunts ends up starting a movement to commemorate a pioneer of school integration.

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On spring break, student volunteers help restore Civil War cemetery

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On spring break, student volunteers help restore Civil War cemetery

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https://newsela.com/read/civilwar-cemetery/id/16276/

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Newsela | Army of volunteers helps restore historic Civil War cemetery

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Freedom Riders marker in Fredericksburg, Virginia, tells the "untold story"

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Freedom Riders marker in Fredericksburg, Virginia, tells the "untold story"

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https://newsela.com/read/freedom-riders-marker-fredericksburg/id/2001020859/

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Newsela | Freedom Riders marker in Fredericksburg, Virginia, tells the "untold story"

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Even longtime residents of Fredericksburg don't realize the important piece of history in their town.

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Georgia students get historic marker approved to memorialize MLK’s arrest, release

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Georgia students get historic marker approved to memorialize MLK’s arrest, release

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https://newsela.com/read/georgia-memorializes-mlk-arrest/id/2001016818/

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Newsela | Georgia students get historic marker approved to memorialize MLK's arrest, release

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"Commemorating King" team places historic marker.

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New England artist raises awareness about climate with "historic" plaques

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New England artist raises awareness about climate with "historic" plaques

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https://newsela.com/read/climate-change-markers/id/2000000985/

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Newsela | New England artist raises awareness about climate with "historic" plaques

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New England artist uses "historic" markers of natural events to spark climate awareness.

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2019 Florence Kidder Memorial Scholarship - Second Place Essay by Jonathan Shropshire

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2019 Florence Kidder Memorial Scholarship - Second Place Essay by Jonathan Shropshire

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https://www.ncdames.org/2019-florence-kidder-memorial-scholarship---second-place-essay

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One of my favorite things about North Carolina is her many beautiful roads. Quite possibly my favorite road lies after taking a left off Beattie's Ford onto Highway 73 toward Cowan's Ford. This route always sparks feelings of contentment while I cross over the Catawba River and see the water shimmering in the sunlight as it flows south. What makes the road the most interesting, however, is the tall proud marker that stands on the western end of the bridge. Printed in bold lettering is: BATTLE OF COWAN'S FORD / CORNWALLIS, PURSUING / GREENE, CROSSED THE / CATAWBA, 7 MI, W, AFTER / SHARP FIGHT, FEB.,1781. A small memorial that is a reminder of a monumental battle (Historical Marker).

Two and a half centuries ago, Lord Charles Cornwallis, General of the British army, marched his troops through the backcountry of North Carolina pursuing patriot General, Nathanael Greene, and his army. The war was in its last months and Greene knew that a large-scale battle with Cornwallis was inevitable. He knew that the British would need to cross the Catawba River in order to maintain pursuit and surmised that if he delayed Cornwallis' crossing, he could postpone the inevitable to strategically pick the time and place of the massive battle to come (History Project). To enact his plan, Greene left behind General William Davidson with a relatively small force to slow the British advance. Cornwallis understood that he would have to be deceptive in order to cross unnoticed. He sent a detachment down the river to Beattie's Ford to fake a crossing; meanwhile, he and his army planned to cross at Cowan's Ford. However, Davidson knew his opponent, and realizing what Cornwallis was planning, rushed his troops to Cowan's Ford. Under the heavy cloak of a foggy night the British waded through the river. For 400 yards they marched, four to a column, muskets in hand, using staffs to steady themselves in the current. The cover of fog acted in British favor for by the time Davidson's forces were alerted to the Redcoats' marching through the current, Cornwallis had nearly completed his task. The British soon began to climb ashore (Cross). Davidson and the American patriots fought valiantly, still needing to delay Cornwallis as much as possible. However, when the British superior numbers and canons decimated the American militia, Davidson called for retreat. Courageously rallying his forces to fall back, a ball stuck him in the chest and pierced his heart. The rest of the patriots scattered and escaped, and it seemed the British had ended the day with a victory (Americanwarus).

Many people may look at the outcome of this battle and see an American defeat. The British successfully crossed the Catawba River and continued their pursuit. However, I always choose to look at the big picture. Davidson had postponed Cornwallis just enough so General Greene could hurry to the Dan River and safely cross to Virginia, able to rest and obtain supplies (Cross). What seemed a tale of defeat turned into a story of sacrifice and hope. Davidson and multiple others stayed behind and gave their lives so their compatriots could escape. General Greene would use the Battle of Cowan's Ford to revise his battle strategy, contributing to his victory over Cornwallis in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. This American triumph led directly to the British surrender at Yorktown seven months later (Surrender at Yorktown). Due the efforts and sacrifice of General Davidson and his men at Cowan's Ford, America had become one step closer to freedom.

Now when I take that turn onto highway 73 and cross over the Catawba, I don't just admire the view, I am reminded of the events that took place and the battle that was waged. As I look out the car window, I see the Redcoats trudge through the swirling waters and the Patriots on the other side waiting for them. I hear the firing of muskets and the cries of war. As I jump out of my car, stand underneath that proud marker, and admire what lies around me, I remember a man's sacrifice that would eventually end a war and unite my country.

Work Cited
Americanwasrus. "Battle of Cowan's Ford." American Revolutionary War, 15 Jan. 2018,
revolutionarywar.us/year-1781/battle-cowans-ford/.
"Battle of Cowan's Ford Historical Marker." The Historical Marker Database, 19 Jan. 2019,
www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=127308.
Cross, Jerry L. "Cowan's Ford, Battle of | NCpedia." NCpedia Home Page | NCpedia,
www.ncpedia.org/cowans-ford-battle.
North Carolina History Project. "Battle of Cowan's Ford (February 1, 1781)." North Carolina
History Project, northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/battle-of-cowans-ford-february-1-1781/.
"The British Surrender at Yorktown." America's Story from America's Library,
www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/revolut/jb_revolut_yorktown_1.html.

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2019 Florence Kidder Memorial Scholarship - Second Place Essay

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One of my favorite things about North Carolina is her many beautiful roads. Quite possibly my favorite road lies after taking a left off Beattie's Ford onto Highway 73 toward Cowan's Ford. This route always sparks feelings of contentment while I cross over the Catawba River and see the water shimmering in the sunlight as it flows south.

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History, Memory, and Monuments:  An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh

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History, Memory, and Monuments:  An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh

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https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/resedu/savage.htm

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Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh
"Monuments are good for nothing," a North Carolina Congressman declared in 1800.In the founding years of the United States, many argued that democracy and the spread of literacy had made commemorative rituals and monuments obsolete, a leftover from the days of monarchy and superstition.Reflecting on Congress's reluctance to fund a monument to George Washington, John Quincy Adams famously observedthat "democracy has no monuments.""True memory," many Americans liked to claim, lay not in a pile of dead stones but in the living hearts of the people.

Since those early days of the Republic, democracy has changed its tune.Commemoration has become utterly commonplace, deeply rooted in the cultural practices of the nation.Not only did Americans come to embrace traditional forms of commemoration, but they pioneered new practices, particularly in the remembrance of war dead.Today American commemorative practices have multiplied and spread in ways no one could have imagined, extending now even into the solar system (with a monument to the fallen Columbia crew on Mars).

While commemorative practices have been expanding for nearly two centuries, the academic literature on commemoration has mushroomed in the past twenty years.So many scholars from such a variety of disciplines have joined the "memory boom" that mapping the field has become effectively impossible.Moreover, scholars often talk at cross purposes with one another or simply in ignorance of each other's work.This essay, while by necessity impressionistic, will try to pinpoint key questions, debates, findings, and trends.

The first key question might be, what is commemoration?Dictionary definitions tell us that to commemorate is to "call to remembrance," to mark an event or a person or a group by a ceremony or an observance or a monument of some kind.Commemorations might be ephemeral or permanent;the key point is that they prod collective memory in some conspicuous way.

French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs ushered in the modern academic study of collective memory with his book The Social Frameworks of Memory (1925) in which he argued that all memory - even personal memory - is a social process, shaped by the various groups (family, religious, geographical, etc.)to which individuals belong.In an even more influential posthumous essay, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory" (1950), published after his death in a Nazi concentration camp, Halbwachs insisted on a distinction between history and collective memory: history aims for a universal, objective truth severed from the psychology of social groups while "every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time."Thus our view of the past does not come primarily from professional historical scholarship but from a much more complicated and interwoven set of relationships to mass media, tourist sites, family tradition, and the spaces of our upbringing with all their regional, ethnic, and class diversity - to name just a few factors.Just as personal memory is now understood to be a highly selective, adaptive process of reconstructing the past, shaped by present needs and contexts, so collective memory is a product of social groups and their ever evolving character and interests.Hence the now commonplace notion that collective memory is "constructed," amidst a perpetual political battleground.Almost everyone now agrees with American historian Michael Kammen's assertion, made in his magisterial volume Mystic Chords of Memory (1991) that "societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind - manipulating the past in order to mold the present."

Yet even when collective memory is qualified in this way, many scholars remain skeptical of the notion.In a 2001 essay on "The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies" social historian Jay Winter asserted that we need "a more rigorous and tightly argued set of propositions about what exactly memory is, and what it has been in the past."Some scholars even question the existence of collective memory.The very idea of collective memory seems to assume a unity of purpose - as if many different people somehow share a common mind - that belies the reality of even the smallest family group, let alone a diverse nation like the U.S.James Wertsch has argued in Voices of Collective Remembering (2002) that collective memory is not a thing in itself but many different acts of remembering, shaped by overarching social forces and cognitive frameworks such as narrative. Susan Sontag in her final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2002) went even further and argued that there isn't a collective memory at all but there is "collective instruction," a complex process - left mostly unexplained in her book - by which certain ideas and images become more important than others.

"We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left," French scholar Pierre Nora has famously argued ( Realms of Memory, orig. 1984).Nora claimed that modern societies invest so heavily in "lieux de memoire" [memory sites, such as monuments, museums, archives, and historic places] because these have replaced "real environments of memory," the living memory that was once nourished spontaneously in premodern societies.Nora's claim echoes the anti-monument rhetoric of early American republicans.Like the republicans before him, Nora suspected that modern commemorations were invented to make up for a lack of organic unity within modern nations and societies.David Lowenthal's book The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985) made a similar point, arguing that modern societies try desperately to resurrect the past because it has already disappeared from living culture.While this core insight has been productive - modernity does indeed disrupt old patterns of collective memory - it is also reductive, failing to take into account not only the importance of commemoration in premodern societies but also the persistence of the past and "spontaneous" practices of memory in modern societies such as the U.S.

Nora's attention to sites of memory and the politics surrounding them has had a profound influence on American scholarship, but many scholars who cite him simply ignore or overlook the assumptions that underpin his work.Whatever their theoretical allegiances, scholars keep circling around the same basic questions.Who guides the process of remembering and towards what ends?Why do specific commemorative projects take particular forms?How do commemorative practices actually shape social relations and cultural beliefs (rather than simply reflecting them)?Inevitably this last question raises the key issue of how conspicuous acts of commemoration like public ceremonies and monument building relate to the more everyday practices of schooling, reminiscing, and unconscious habit that carry knowledge and tradition from one generation to another.This question is the least directly addressed issue, probably because it is the hardest to research, though it haunts much of the scholarship on memory.

In the U.S. the "memory boom" seems to have been inspired largely by two phenomena: the coming to grips with the Holocaust, which began in earnest in the 1970s, and the unexpected success of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982.While the literature on Holocaust memory is now vast and intricate, James E. Young's book The Texture of Memory (1993) has become indispensable.Focusing on the unique problems posed by the trauma of the Holocaust, Young surveyed a range of memorial solutions in Europe and the U.S. from traditional heroic figurative monuments to avant-garde installations that deliberately undermined the very premise that monuments are permanent.Throughout the book Young argued that monument building is a living process, in some sense always unfinished; no matter how much a monument may pretend to be eternal and unchanging, its meaning always evolves as its viewers bring new concerns and understandings to it.Since the Holocaust was so clearly an event to be pondered rather than celebrated, monuments could never hope to fix its meaning for all time.

The phenomenal power and popularity of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial almost immediately revived scholarly interest in the subject of public monuments.Traditionally, public monuments had been the most prestigious forms of commemoration because they were designed as permanent showcases of public memory, to last for the ages.But in the twentieth century, scholars came to consider the public monument a dead form.Lewis Mumford wrote in The Culture of Cities (1938) that "the notion of a modern monument is a veritable contradiction in terms."While public monuments did continue to be erected in the mid-20 th century, scholars paid little attention until Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial offered a new, distinctly contemporary memorial format, an open solution - to follow James Young's suggestion - that deliberately encouraged multiple meanings and uses. This spawned an immense literature on the monument itself and a renewed interest in how monuments and other public practices of commemoration work in modern society.

Fittingly, one of the most frequently cited books on American public memory, John Bodnar's Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992), began with a discussion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.Bodnar, an eminent social historian of ethnic and immigrant communities, was dissatisfied with the all too frequent assumption that commemorations were top-down affairs imposed by ruling elites on a passive populace.The success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial demonstrated to him that commemoration interwove what he called "official" and "vernacular" memory, official memory driven by the need of the state to mythologize itself and maintain the loyalty of its citizens and vernacular memory driven by the need of ordinary people to pursue their social and political concerns in their local communities.Surveying a broad range of local commemorations including monuments and anniversaries, Bodnar argued that national patriotism worked to "mediate" or reconcile the competing interests of official and vernacular memories.While Bodnar's distinction between official and vernacular can break down in practice, his book has helped establish that commemoration "involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments."

An interesting example that complicates Bodnar's framework is Melissa Dabakis's book, Monuments Of Manliness : Visualizing Labor In American Sculpture, 1880-1935 (1998), which studied various intersections of class, gender, and politics in the generally elite form of monumental sculpture.Her investigation of the competing monuments to the Haymarket protest in Chicago in 1886 - one to the police, one to the anarchists - demonstrated that the "struggle for supremacy" was not only a conflict over which version of events would become officially enshrined in public space but also a shifting political conflict between left-wing and right-wing groups.Ironically the official police monument had a more "realistic" vernacular form and definite vernacular appeal, at least among police recruits, while the anarchist monument had a more elite form laden with art-historical associations.

Art historians like Dabakis, trained to study both the patronage and the reception of works of art, have realized for decades that monumental works become especially contested arenas, precisely because the work has a high public profile.One of the earliest and best studies of U.S. monuments was Michele Bogart's Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (1989).Bogart's book centered on the golden age of the public monument, a time when sculptural monuments proliferated not only in New York but throughout cities across the continent.Her book traced the rise of an unabashedly elite genre of edifying commemoration at the end of the nineteenth century, supplied by well-known artists and their powerful political patrons.But the story concluded with a fascinating account of how this elite consensus unraveled in the early twentieth century, as various groups - such as newly enfranchised women - began to acquire a voice in the process and to challenge the dominant sculptural language.Since then that story has been extended by scholars such as Andrew Shanken, whose 2002 essay in Art Bulletin focused on the mid-twentieth century movement to replace sculptural monuments with "living memorials" (utilitarian memorials such as highways, parks, and concert halls).Throughout the twentieth century memorials increasingly transformed from mere sculptural objects into more complex spaces, often with museum or archival functions.Benjamin Hufbauer's book Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (2005) has shown how gargantuan Presidential libraries have become a dominant type, overshadowing or even supplanting the older hero-on-a-pedestal that had once been the preferred type of monument to a great leader.

As noted above, however, traditional public monuments never disappeared, and they continued to be a powerful form of commemoration even as they lost their appeal to cultural elites.Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall's Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (1991) is a study of one such monument, the Marine Corps War Memorial erected in Arlington, Virginia in 1954.Their book embedded the monument within popular culture, where the iconic image originally came from (a wartime newspaper photo) and where it continues to live and thrive.The phenomenon in which particular monuments have become icons of the nation has been studied in books such as Marvin Trachtenberg's Statue of Liberty (1976), Rex Alan Smith's Carving of Mount Rushmore (1985), Christopher A. Thomas's The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (2002), and most recently Nicolaus Mills's Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial (2004).Albert Boime in The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (1998) demonstrated the authoritarian and exclusionary character of many of these icons, although he did not fully take into account what Bodnar might call the vernacular attachment to iconic forms of commemorative art.

Washington, D.C. has received a great deal of attention because it is the commemorative heart of the nation.The role of the Capitol building in commemorating the western expansion of the nation, and the defeat of Indians who stood in the way, has been examined in Vivien Fryd, (1992).Other aspects of the Capitol's commemorative program have been explored in Art And Empire : The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815-1860 American Pantheon : Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol, a collection of essays edited By Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma (2004).The development of the "monumental core" of the capital city has been much studied, but the single best volume on the national Mall as a commemorative landscape remains The Mall in Washington, 1791-1991, edited by Richard Longstreth (1991).Countless specialized studies on commemorative practices in the capital have been produced - on parades, ceremonies, cemeteries, city plans, outdoor sculpture - but surprisingly few serious synthetic studies of how the city has worked as a commemorative landscape.

More scholarly work in this direction is likely as the collective memory field continues to expand beyond its traditional base in sociology, history, and art history and embraces the work of geographers, landscape historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, and other academic practitioners. Richard Handler and Eric Gable's enthnographic study of America's most famous living museum, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997), is an excellent example, investigating how the historical lessons of this site are continuously reshaped or even ignored as they are put into practice by reenactors and consumed by tourists.Much of the newer work is in essay form.Geographer Derek Alderman, for example, has investigated the issue of commemorative street naming focusing on Martin Luther King, Jr., in a series of articles in professional geography journals.Some recent work has been collected in anthologies, such as Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape (2001), edited by archaeologist Paul A. Shackel; Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (2002), edited by Jacob J. Climo and Maria G. Cattell; and Places of Commemoration : Search for Identity and Landscape Design (2001), edited by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn.What all this work tends to have in common is an effort to map individual commemorative sites within larger contexts of remembrance - landscapes, geographic and administrative units, and social networks created by tourism, professions, and other factors.

This should remind us that commemoration entails not only building, naming, or shaping physical sites.Commemoration as a practice also involves ritual acts in and occupations of public space as well as other kinds of performance and consumption that may leave no lasting trace on the landscape.W. Lloyd Warner's classic study (1959) was an early examination of the role of patriotic parades and other symbolic observances in civic life.David Glassberg's The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans American Historical Pageantry : The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990) examined the craze for commemorative pageants in the beginning of the past century, but this phenomenon has a long history in the U.S.David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes : The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997) and Sarah J. Purcell's Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (2002) both showed that in the early national period, festivals and anniversaries helped overcome partisan and class divisions and cement a national identity.In our own time, new electronic media have greatly expanded and altered the terrain of commemoration.Marita Sturken's Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997) has made a pioneering contribution in this area; her study examined commemoration across many different media, by charting the ways in which memories of the victims of national crises circulated throughout American culture in films, monuments, medical practices, and domestic grieving turned public.Yet George Lipsitz's Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990) has argued that even in age dominated by television and commercial culture, popular traditions of storytelling and festivity among disenfranchised groups, such as working-class blacks in New Orleans, have still played a part in upholding their own versions of the past.

All these diverse commemorative practices come together most powerfully around the remembrance of war.It is no surprise that much of the literature on commemoration in the U.S. deals with war and its aftermath.G. Kurt Piehler's (2003), and Mitch Kachun, Remembering War the American Way (1995) has remained a useful synthetic study, but the literature has grown to the point where synthesis now seems quixotic.The memory of the Civil War has stood out as a particularly fertile topic.In recent years a great deal of work has been done on memory and race, as scholars from numerous angles have shown how the commemoration of the Civil War helped to shape new racial relations within American society - removing African American soldiers from mainstream public memory, defeating the dream of racial equality, and advancing the cause of white supremacy.David W. Blight's ambitious synthesis Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) has become the indispensable reference for this argument.The book surveys an enormous range of commemorative practices from oratory to pageantry to monuments and beyond.More specialized studies of the racial relations of war memory include Kirk Savage, Festivals of Freedom : Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (2003).Recent studies have made ever more nuanced analyses that interweave the issue of race with gender, class, and region.Exemplary collections along these lines include Where These Memories Grow : History, Memory, and Southern Identity (2000), edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and Monuments to the Lost Cause : Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (2003), edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Paul A. Shackel, Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape

In addition to reshaping racial relations and beliefs, the scale of the Civil War dramatically changed and expanded commemorative practices, creating a new cult of the veteran and new modes and technologies of remembering the war dead - innovations that preceded comparable developments in Europe by years or even decades.For the first time, photographers shot images of battlefield corpses, a profound shift in the understanding and memorialization of warfare analyzed in studies such as Timothy Sweet, Traces of War : Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (1990) and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs : Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989).The emergence of veterans organizations and their role in promoting the memory of the common soldier have been explored in Stuart McConnell's Glorious Contentment : the Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (1992) and in Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary's To Die For : The Paradox of American Patriotism (1999).Kirk Savage in Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves has examined the resulting democratization of war memorials, and the phenomenal spread of a new type of ordinary-soldier monument.Another innovation, the creation of national soldier cemeteries such as Gettysburg, was briefly examined as a precedent for twentieth-century European practices by historian George Mosse's Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (1990).Since then this line of research has been extended by others such as Susan-Mary Grant in a series of essays, most recently in the journal Nations and Nationalism (2005).

Battlefields too have been witness to dramatically changing patterns of commemoration, and thus have posed intricate problems for their stewards, most notably the National Park Service.Edward T. Linenthal in Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (1991) examined the ways in which battlefields from the Revolution to WWII have been transformed into "sacred" landscapes which various groups fight to protect from political or racial or commercial defilement.Any commemorative narratives that stray from the narrowly defined script of military heroism become suspect.For instance the National Park Service's efforts to expand the historical significance of Civil War battlefields beyond military history into social and political issues such as slavery have encountered resistance both inside and outside the agency, as Paul Shackel has shown in his case study of Manassas ( Memory in Black and White).More recently Jim Weeks in Gettysburg : Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (2003) has called into question the notion of the sacred by arguing that tourism and the marketplace have profoundly shaped even the most revered battlefield from its very inception.He has shown that, as cultural norms have changed, the standards of appropriate commemorative behaviors have also changed - sometimes in surprising ways.For example, battle reenactments originated as commercial entertainments that elites discouraged as frivolous, but in the past two decades have grown into a wildly popular participatory sport, with ever more stringent standards of authenticity.Ironically, the hundreds of regimental and officer monuments that were once the heart of the commemorative landscape have now become intrusions into the "authentic" experience of the past!

Besides battlefield reenactments, another major new participatory phenomenon of memorialization is the spontaneous offering of personal mementos at national memorials, which began in the early 1980s at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.Kristin Ann Hass has examined the roots and meanings of this phenomenon in Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1998).At the same time recovery efforts and reverence for the bodies of the war dead have reached new extremes of emotional and financial cost, as Thomas M. Hawley has recently investigated in The Remains of War : Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (2005).All of these developments indicate an extension and transformation of the popular sphere of memory practices of the late nineteenth century.Ordinary citizens increasingly have become the subject and the actor in commemorative initiatives, even as the power and cost of the "military-industrial complex" have grown mightily.

In recent times the remembrance of war has become connected almost inextricably with the issue of trauma.Once again the Holocaust and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial have served as the key landmarks in this process.Young's , edited by Daniel Sherman and Terry Nardin (2006), and Terry Smith's examination of the contemporary struggle over iconic architecture in Texture of Memory and Sturken's Tangled Memories have shed light on the new importance of victimization within commemorative practices.Geographer Kenneth E. Foote's study Architecture of Aftermath (2006). Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (1997) examined how Americans have dealt with landscapes marked by war, mass murder, and other traumatic events.In a related development, the remembering and forgetting of Indian removal, confinement, and extermination have become increasingly important subjects in studies of national historic sites such as Dispossessing the Wilderness : Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (1999) by Mark David Spence,and The Politics of Hallowed Ground : Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (1999) by Mario Gonzalez and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.Edward Linenthal has created the most extensive body of work on trauma and commemoration, in a series of meticulously researched books on subjects spanning from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first: Sacred Ground, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (1995), and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (2001).Since 9-11, the subject has become even more important, and numerous scholars have already entered the field.Two new examples include Savage's study of the "therapeutic memorial" in an essay in the collection Terror, Culture, Politics:Rethinking 9/11

While work on commemoration continues to multiply, and to examine ever more carefully how memory practices penetrate all facets of our collective life, much work remains to be done on the actual impact of all these practices.Few scholars have attempted to theorize the relationship between commemoration and tradition, what we might call the exterior and interior faces of historical consciousness.On the one hand are public sites and rituals of memory, and on the other hand are ingrained habits of thought and action that persist in individuals, families, and communities across long spans of time.While few scholars would agree with Nora that interior memory has disappeared, most scholars have focused on the exterior struggles to construct memory in one form rather than another.One of the only scholars to argue against this trend has been social scientist Barry Schwartz, who has written a series of articles and books on American Presidents in historical memory.In .)In fact, historical errors and deliberate distortions abound in the landscape of commemoration, as James W. Loewen's amazing study, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (2000) Schwartz has argued that memory is not constructed anew in each new commemorative project; instead, he has asserted that in a democratic society historical facts have serious weight and help create "core elements" of memory that persist over long periods of time.Yet his belief in an authentic "core" memory led him, ironically, to downplay certain historical facts, such as the outright fraud and hucksterism involved in "assembling" the log cabin in which Lincoln was supposedly born.(For more on the log cabin story, see Dwight Pitcaithley's meticulously researched essay in Shackel's Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999), has so amply demonstrated.But Schwartz's point remains well taken: scholars must take into account not only the changing politics of commemoration but also the stubborn persistence of traditions and beliefs - some of which persist even when they conflict with historical fact or common sense.

This perspective might have helped scholars prepare better for the emotionally charged controversy over the Smithsonian's ill-fated Enola Gay exhibit, which was intended to mark the 50 th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima by putting the event in historical context.The controversy was a particularly dramatic example of how the work of historians, based on supposedly apolitical principles of evidence and analysis, came into conflict with powerful "memory constituencies," whose long-cherished beliefs about the righteousness of the American military cemented their group identities as veterans and patriots.Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Englehardt's History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (1998) untangled this controversy and showed how the partisan politics and "culture wars" of the time helped fuel it.At the same time the book showed how the Enola Gay fiasco was not simply another episode in the "politics of commemoration."The controversy transcended the politics of the moment and became a classic confrontation between history and collective memory - anticipated in Halbwachs' original distinction - where history inevitably loses precisely because it lacks the unshakeable beliefs of psychically invested constituencies.Some of the contributors to History Wars asked whether the "patriotic" narratives of commemoration could be expanded and humanized to encompass the multiple realities of war, to bring the longstanding traditional stories of triumph into contact with more tragic stories of the human cost and moral ambiguity of warfare.The question has no easy answer.

One pioneering effort to integrate the various realms of internal and external memory, of invisible traditions and visible histories, is Martha Norkunas's Monuments and Memory: History and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts (2002).Her book traced the changing relationship between the public, mostly masculine face of memory in Lowell - in honorific monuments and historical sites - and the largely oral traditions, passed on by women, that preserved the memory of those who kept the community intact and functioning outside the public eye.While her study would benefit from more analysis of the interaction between these realms of memory, her book points in a useful direction.Likewise, Bodnar's distinction between vernacular and official memory remains intuitively useful, but needs further refinement, retesting, and revision in order to understand better how these realms of memory interpenetrate one another.This might help explain, for example, the persistence and power of military commemoration.How does the inner/vernacular memory of women, ethnic groups, and other ordinary Americans help support the outer/officialmemory of such a quintessentially top-down, masculine institution as the military? Pursuing questions like these would eventually help bridge the gap between the spectacular "politics of commemoration" and the more inconspicuous workings of tradition.How the past is produced, consumed, internalized, and acted upon will no doubt remain a rich and complex problem for scholars as they work further to extend and integrate the approaches outlined in this essay.

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History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration

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Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh "Monuments are good for nothing," a North Carolina Congressman declared in 1800.In the founding years of the United States, many argued that democracy and the spread of literacy had made commemorative rituals and monuments obsolete, a leftover from the days of monarchy and superstition.Reflecting on Congress's reluctance to fund a monument to George Washington, John Quincy Adams famously observedthat "democracy has no monuments.""True memory," many Americans liked to claim, lay not in a pile of dead stones but in the living hearts of the people.

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Street Names as Commemorative Landscapes: The Case of Martin Luther King, Jr.by Derek H. Alderman (2012)

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Street Names as Commemorative Landscapes: The Case of Martin Luther King, Jr.by Derek H. Alderman (2012)

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https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/features/essays/alderman_one/

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by Derek H. Alderman (2012)

The term "commemorative landscape" refers to a wide range of material sites devoted to remembering the past. They run the spectrum from large, ornate monuments that employ symbolism and poetry to the visually generic and more literal narration of the past on highway historical markers. One of the most widespread of commemorative landscape types is the street name. In addition to being an important way of marking and referencing space for the purposes of orientation, street names, and place names in general, are used to create symbolic connections with the past by commemorating and honoring the contributions of historical figures-from industrialists and athletes to military and political leaders. As noted by cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky in Nation into State, the United States has a long history of naming places, especially streets, after patriot heroes and other notables. Consider, for the example, the many places named after Georgia Washington. They include roads, cities, counties, the nation's capitol, and a whole state. These commemorative place names, according to Zelinsky, play a major role in not only memorializing the past but also encouraging public identification with certain nationalistic political values. Commemorative naming-along with the building of monuments, museums, and other memorial symbols-work to give people a sense of time and community as well as a sense of place.

The Power of the Street Name

Franklin Street, Monroe, N.C. in Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards (P077), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill

Despite its importance, street naming has been relatively under-analyzed in the study of public commemoration. This neglect is due, in part, to the difficulty in inventorying and interpreting the historical references found on the many roadways of the United States, although the advent of searchable databases and geospatial tools has significantly reduced this problem. In addition, it is not always a simple matter to determine for whom a street was named. Is a Franklin Avenue in one's hometown always a reference to the statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin? Or could it refer to another Franklin who lived in and contributed to the area? Finding out for sure requires archival work in a city or town, going back to the time when the street was first named by governmental authorities. Street names are, by design and function, limited to one or just a few words and thus cannot provide a lengthy description and interpretation of the commemorated figure as one would find at other memorials. Because of this fact, it is possible that a person could live, work, and travel along a named street and not truly know the historical contributions of the person honored along that road. Because street names serve as both address and historical reference, they have a communicative structure and public impact different from other types of commemorative landscapes.

While not discounting the challenges that limit our appreciation of street names, we would be wrong to dismiss the significance of this neglected part of the commemorative landscape. While a street name's dual existence as an address and commemorative symbol can pose certain limitations, it can also be an advantage. Because of the practical importance of street names, they inscribe ideas about the past into many of the practices and texts of daily life. Street names are found on road maps, phonebook listings, mail, advertising billboards, GPS directions, and, of course, road signs. Thus, the past is given tangibility and familiarity. Through the street name, public commemoration is made part of the language-visual and verbal-of the city and its inhabitants. As some proponents of commemorative street naming suggest, a road arguably touches more people more frequently than a museum, statue, or historical plaque. Hence, while street naming is not as highly evocative as more conventional forms of commemoration, it offers a means of making the past a visible and intimate part of the everyday realm. This ordinariness is part of the cultural power of street names as a commemorative landscape.

Street names, like other types of commemorative landscapes, bring a spatial permanence to the commemoration of the past. Unlike a holiday that focuses intense public attention on a historical figure or event for just one or a few days a year, the commemorative street name serves as a daily reminder of what (and who) is historically important. While street names often are characterized by a permanence that outlives their creators, they are not static commemorative symbols. Government elites in countries such as Israel, Germany, Russia, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia have changed place names-particularly commemorative street names-to advance reinvented notions of national history and identity as political regimes rise and fall. Granted, all monuments and memorials are susceptible to change, but it is especially the case with road names given that they do not have the physical weightiness of other commemorative landscapes. Renaming a street does not require tearing down a statue, relocating an obelisk, melting down historical plaques, or redesigning a museum.

Because street names can be revised to narrate the past in different ways, they provide students of the commemorative landscape a useful indicator of changing social trends in public commemoration. While the United States has not engaged in the same level of rewriting of commemorative street names as other countries, it has not been immune to change. One change that is especially evident in the landscape of American commemorative street names is the growing importance of remembering the historical contributions of African Americans. These name changes not only assert the public importance of minority social groups within the story of the United States, but they also challenge a long tradition of naming places after only white male heroes. The most widespread example of using street names to create a more racially diverse and inclusive commemorative landscape is the naming of roadways for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., although streets have also been named after other African American historical figures, including Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Rosa Parks.

Martin Luther King Streets

As of 2010, the United States had at least 893 places with a street memorializing Martin Luther King, Jr. King's namesakes are found in 40 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. While King has been honored with street names across the country, the southeastern states have a particularly high density of streets named after him. Over 75% of the nation's Martin Luther King Streets are located in ten Southern states, and North Carolina has the seventh largest number of named streets with 53. This is not surprising given that the South, including North Carolina, was an early battleground in the Civil Rights Movement and that remembering the struggle for racial equality is an increasingly important part of the region and the state's heritage tourism industry. Naming streets for King occurs throughout the urban hierarchy-from large places such as Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Chapel Hill to small places such as Grifton, Norlina, Rowland, and St. Pauls. Proposals to name these streets are often brought by local African American community leaders who envision being able to engage in commemoration as part of the democratization of society and the gaining of a greater political voice. Not surprisingly, there is a strong relationship between the likelihood of a city naming a street and its racial composition. On average, African Americans make up over a third of the population in a place with a street named for King.

Dr. King did not visit every community that honors him with a street name, but this is not necessarily the point of commemorative street naming. Naming a street for King is not simply a local commemorative practice. It is also about a community participating in a larger national and regional culture of commemoration. The symbolic power of the named street is not simply a product of its place in a single community but also how it joins a larger geography of roads dedicated to King. Not surprisingly, when some African American leaders request that a street be named for King, they cite the fact that other surrounding communities have already named streets and the importance of having a King street in most cities in the United States given his national prominence. The more geographically expansive this commemorative landscape becomes, the more it speaks to King's larger historical importance. As street naming proponents also assert, all communities have benefited from King's achievements, regardless of whether he was physically present in the community. A granite marker along Martin Luther King Road in Pawley Island, South Carolina, captures this sentiment best in its inscription: "Honoring a world citizen who never walked this road but whose life's works helped all of those who do."

Asserting the broader historical significance of King is not meant to suggest, however, that places with a named street lack significant, place-specific historical connections with the civil rights leader. For instance, a named street can be found in Rocky Mount along with a statue of King and a park dedicated to him. It was in 1962 at the city's Booker T. Washington gymnasium that King delivered a speech in which he made an early invocation of the "I have a dream" refrain, later made famous in his 1963 Washington, D.C. address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Durham also has a named street. King made several visits to the city during his life, including during the Greensboro Sit-ins of 1960. He was scheduled to speak in Durham on April 4, 1968, but cancelled to come to the aid of striking sanitation workers in Tennessee. He was assassinated that very day on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

The cultural meaning and power of street names comes not only from how they connect with specific community histories, but also how they connect with other commemorative narratives and landscapes. Found along Martin Luther King Junior Drive in Asheville is a recreational park that also bears his name. The centerpiece of the park is a life-size statue of King leading two small children by the hand, an appropriate association given that the city markets the park as friendly to kids. At the Martin Luther King Memorial Gardens in Raleigh, a bronze statue of King overlooks a major road named for him. Next to the statue is a granite monument with flow water and inscribed with the names of civil rights notables from the local area. The case of Raleigh illustrates an instance in which a street name can lead the public to find memorials and monuments that retell the past in ways that cannot be done by commemorative naming alone. Without the memorial garden and water monument, we are left with an image of a Civil Rights Movement led strictly by a national icon, allowing us to forget its important grassroots dimensions and the role played by everyday people seeking social change.

The case of honoring King through street naming, while a valuable indicator of changes in the commemorative landscapes of North Carolina and the South, is also reflective of how these changes can be controversial. Another part of the symbolic power of street naming is its geographic connectivity. Because of the way that certain streets cut across different communities within cities, street naming has the potential to make certain visions of the past accessible to a wide range of social groups. However, it is this potential to touch and connect disparate groups-some of which may not identify with King-that also makes street naming open to debate. For many street naming proponents, it is difficult to convince the white establishment that King's name belongs on major thoroughfares, that his legacy has relevance and resonance to everyone's lives. Opposition from business and property owners along potentially renamed roads has led government leaders to honor King along minor streets or portions of roads confined to the black community. It is a poignant memorial to a man known for fighting against segregation. As journalist Jonathan Tilove argued in Along Martin Luther King: "To name any street for King is to invite an accounting of how the street makes good on King's promise or mocks it." While this practice of segregating memory is certainly evident in North Carolina, there are notable exceptions of King's name being found on major roads, such as Chapel Hill, Charlotte, New Bern, and Wilmington.

As illustrated in the context of memorializing King, street names are important and contestable commemorative landscapes. They serve as literal and figurative signposts, helping give the public a common historical frame of reference while also getting them to work, school, shops, and back home. At the same time that street names work in subtle terms, they can also become highly charged commemorative arenas for interpreting and debating the reputations of historical figures as well as larger issues of identity and social power. Commemorative street naming represents a means of claiming symbolic ownership of places and the historical meanings associated with those places.

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Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina

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by Derek H. Alderman (2012) The term "commemorative landscape" refers to a wide range of material sites devoted to remembering the past. They run the spectrum from large, ornate monuments that employ symbolism and poetry to the visually generic and more literal narration of the past on highway historical markers.

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Deconstructing Historical MarkersHow to question historical places, monuments, memorials, and museumsMark R. Hatlie

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Deconstructing Historical MarkersHow to question historical places, monuments, memorials, and museumsMark R. Hatlie

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http://sites-of-memory.de/main/deconstruction.html

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Return to Sites of Memory main page.
Deconstructing Historical Markers

How to question historical places, monuments, memorials, and museums
Mark R. Hatlie All the images are linked to more photos and information on the markers shown. Click on the image to go to the marker page.
Most all of us are caught unprepared by monuments and memorials, if we notice them at all. Either we stop and view a roadside historical marker, or visit an obelisk or statue in some city we are visiting (we rarely pay any attention to those near where we live, at least not where I live, here in Europe, where they are among places people actually go and not off on the edge of town like is often the case in the U.S., at least in the western half of the country). We don't usually go to markers which refer to things about which we are well informed. Whether our visit is intentional or by chance, we rarely have taken the time beforehand to study up on the events concerned. The monument or memorial then, has a virtual monopoly on our understanding of the events and people it refers to: We simply don't know anything about the guy up on the horse or the name or the date on the plaque. Whatever the monument says, that is what we know at the time of our visit. Unless the events or people refered to spark our interest in an unusual way and we go off and do more research, the marker's story is likely to maintain its monopoly on our knowledge for the future as well. If there is any more information about the theme of the marker nearby, such as in a giftshop or tourist information center, it will almost certainly confirm the impression given by the marker and will rarely tell you anything about the marker itself.

The image here of the man on the horse shows a monument in downown Stuttgart. Hundreds of people undoubtedly walk past it everyday without paying any attention to it. Those who do stop and take notice probably can't put it into its historical context very well. It shows the dates 1870-1871 and gives the names of French towns and dates. Those are the dates and battles of the Franco-Prussian War - but the monument doesn't say so.

As tourists living in or visiting our historical landscape, we simply don't have the resources to overcome this problem. We cannot read two competing biographies of every memorialized hero we encounter or read old newspapers about the events concerned. We don't have the time and simply aren't that interested most of the time. But does that mean that we surrender the field to these brass and granite representations?

We don't have to. And not giving in can make our stops at historical sites, monuments, markers and memorials a bit more interesting if we have learned to deconstruct them. By this I do not mean that we should always carry a hammer and wheel barrow and turn them into dust. I mean we should learn to practice taking one step back and viewing the marker itself as the object of interest. The events to which the marker refers come second. We ignore or put off the memorial's call to remember some event and instead focus on the memorial. (The choice of the term "deconstruct" in this context is arguably somewhat unfortunate. "Deconstruction" carries a lot of academic baggage I did not intend to bring on board when I first titled this essay.)

This can be especially fun if we do know something about the events concerned, but are new to the memorial or its history. A common situation is that the marker is a vague, all-encompassing reminder of something we know something about. For example, the town might have a World War Two or Civil War marker. We know something about those wars - from books, from family stories, from movies and TV documentaries. The memorial doesn't seem to tell us more in terms of facts. Here, we are simply reminded that the war happened and given a brief glimpse into its local repurcussions. Perhaps the memorial lists the local dead. Or perhaps the memorial is dated, giving us a clue as to when the town finally got around to memorializing it. That tidbit is how we begin to "deconstruct" the memorial.

There are several ways to deconstruct a marker (the word I will use to cover all historical representations in the landscape, be they historical markers, historical sites, museums, statues, memorials, cemeteries, or whatever). The viewer can start with a "naive" viewing or "consumption" of the marker first. Then he or she can proceed to think about what the marker is trying to convey, and then consider who may have built it, who may have funded it, what has been left out, etc. The order in which these questions are considered is less important. So please consider the following list as a collection of ideas and not as a roadmap or step-by-step guide. Often, knowing the answers to many of the questions will be impossible without doing further research. It is my hope that by learning to ask these questions and ponder possible answers, however, we can change the way we see these markers into a way that makes visiting them both more interesting and more fun. Maybe next time you walk past a marker, you'll stop and take a closer look at it. And if and when we do have time to actually research a monument before or after visiting it, all the better.

Layers of History

Historical markers create a link between three different situations. First, there is the event or person to which the marker refers, say a military battle. Then, there is the building of the marker. Then there is now - you standing in front of the marker and "learning" from it. In a sense, the marker creates more than a "link," it creates communication over time and sometimes over space, depending on where the marker stands relative to the historical locations of the events memorialized. The distances in time and space can be very great or very small. All three of these layers or situations have a wider context which is important for the marker.

In essence, all that follows below is about being aware of all three stages. In other words, a marker about the "Little Bighorn Battlefield" is only partially about the Battle of Little Bighorn. It is also about the people who put up the marker after the battle was long over and you, the person visiting it now, more than a century after the battle. Most of the questions aim at the second stage - when the marker was built - or at the third stage, the present. That is perhaps why this process is called "deconstruction." It is subversive. The marker, after all, was ostensibly put up to get you to think about the first stage. The whole trick is uncovering what it wants you to think, of course.

Some memorials and monuments consciously connect several layers of the past. The memorial pictured here is a typical German war memorial in that it was originally built to honor the fallen of World War One, but was later expanded to include the Second World War as well. After 1945, the people of the town returned to the same location to expand the former memorial instead of constructing a new one.

Questions To Ask An Historical Marker

Who built it?

Does the monument say who built it? Many markers, such as the memorial shown here for German refugees, actually have information about the designers, builders and dedicators of the marker chisled into them. If so, what can you say about those people? Which section of society did they represent? What was their status or position in society? Does the marker reflect that status? Can you make some guesses about the people based on the marker itself? Who would invest the time and money back then into a marker like this?

Is there any indication of who actually funded the marker? Often, private groups or individuals have an idea for a monument and take the initiative, but much of the money ends up coming from other sources, such as the government. How may the funders of the marker have been pursueded to fork out the funding?

When was it built?

This is closely related to the last question, of course. Does the marker reflect the period in which it was built? There are several ways in which it might do so.

On the surface, there is the artwork or style of the marker. Soviet memorials are often recognizeable at a glance, even without their red stars and flags, because of the way they portray the human form. 19th century monuments often show a preference for ancient Greek and Roman classical style. The Franco-Prussian War memorial shown here, for example, shows crossed Roman-style swords. There are also examples of Greco-Roman helmut designs adorning World War One gravesites, for example, at the Stuttgart military cemetery

But the time the marker was built is also important with reference to the last question, about the people who built it and their role in society. What were the important issues of that period with regard to the events refered to in the marker and what might the people who built it have wanted to say? What were, in short, the "ideological needs" of the sponsors at that time? As Loewen shows in his book, Civil War monuments have varied over time and transport the opinions of when they were built more than any "facts" about the Civil War. The same Stuttgart military cemetery just mentioned shows a marked contrast between the German society of the early 1920s and that of the late 1940s, early 1950s. The cemetery clearly shows how the attitudes toward war and remembrance were as different as night and day.

There is often information about the creation of the marker on the marker itself. War memorials often list donors who helped fund it, politicians who advocated it or unveiled it, etc. That information can play into your thinking about the actual function of the memorial: Was it a community project? A political project? A business venture?

What is the message of the marker?

This is a very complex question and it overlaps with the others in many ways.

Are there overt ideological indicators on the marker such as communist or Christian symbols? Are there overt symbols which you might have expected, but are missing (such as no cross on a memorial for a dead person?) In Germany, groups of three crosses, reminiscent of Golgotha, are common at military cemeteries. This example is from the buriel site for Nazi victims in Tuebingen.

Often, there is text on the monument that is explicit and clear or intentionally vague. In Germany, where the cultures of memory were so different after the two world wars, it is common to have an explicit message with a complete list of the fallen dating to the period after World War One and a vaguely worded plaque added on for the Second World War from the postwar period.

Do the images on the marker convey subtle messeges and can they assumed to be intended by the sponsors? Assume the answer is to both questions is "yes" and look for clues. If there are human figures, are they "doing" anything? Who is doing what? How are they portrayed? How are issues of gender, class, race and age reflected in the people depicted in the marker?

What is the didactic element of the marker? Put another way, does the marker explicitely or implicitely want to teach the target audience something or encourage a particular behavior? For example, often war memorials are interpreted as encouraging the next generation to be willing to go to war or to instill respect for the older generation's sacrifice.

Often for any major event like a war there is a "dominant narrative" or version of history that is mainstream or official. It covers the reasons the war was fought, the just nature of how it was fought, and the reasons why the sacrifices demanded were worth it. Does the marker you are looking at conform to this "dominant narrative"? Does it contradict or ignore that narrative?

The Korean War memorial shown here (left) is in the form of a sundial. What does that mean? I honestly don't know.

Who is the marker for?

This is not always as obvious as it seems. Often, the text on the marker will be explicit about who is included. Many German memorials, for example, are for the fallen soldiers. Some of them appear to be for the soldiers - they show a soldier figure, for example - but also list the names of civilians who were killed during the war.

A related question is about perpetrators. Markers memorializing tragedies can mention the perpetrators, or leave them out. This site has a memorial plaque for the gypsies killed by the Nazis which explicitly mentions the killers, although not by name.

Why is the marker here?

For many markers, this will be easy. The marker is here because the event to which it refers happened here. But sometimes it is not that easy. Lincoln's supposed log cabin got rebuilt and moved. Thoreau's Walden cabin is not at the original location. Some people get statues who never came near the places their statues stand in (Columbus is very good at this). And for large events, the marker has to be put somewhere: Where the general stood or where the troops were dying? Which troops? Or is it because it was easier to build the access road here? Sometimes, markers may have been put up to ideologically "occupy" certain disputed spaces, even if those spaces started out without any particular significance of their own. The Russian Empire for example, used to build Russian Orthodox churches near the city centers of major cities in their empire, even when there was hardly any Orthodox population to use them. They were symbolically occupying down-town real-estate for the message: This is Holy Russia.

The memorial shown here is an example of both a vague message - there is little indication at the memorial itself that it is a memorial for German deserters who were executed by the Nazis - and an interesting location. It was first set up in the downtown part of a large city. Then the city council had it removed. It then spent years on private property, in a lady's yard, before it was put up on the side of a road outside of town. But the location is near a site where deserters were executed. But nothing on the memorial tells that story.

Who is the intended audience of the marker?

Of course most markers are assumed to be visible to anyone walking by. But think more about that. There is the question of location, of course, considered above. If the location is not dictated by the events or people refered to in the marker, a battle site or birth location, does the site chosen reflect a target audience?

Does the marker "speak" to a specific audience or leave audiences out? That inclusion might be linguistic: Is there text in Spanish? More subtly, are there "visitor constituencies" who are being glorified? Villified? Ignored? Sometimes the very name of an historical site already gives clues to the ideological background and the circle of people that the marker is intended to speak to. The Little Bighorn Battlefield used to be called "Custer's Last Stand". Do you see the difference? Are Amerindians included among the circle of people likely to visit the site?

This memorial marker is outside a small German town, but it is in French. It commemorates the deaths of three French soldiers in 1945 and is associated with an ugly incident between the town and the French army. But nothing on the marker appears to be targeted at the local community. They can't even read it.

Does the marker still "function"?

This is the interesting question about the current social purpose of the marker. Obviously, since you are visiting the marker, it is not totally forgotten. But are you the only one there? Do the locals pay any attention to it, or only the pigeons? Do they care for the marker? (Who funds the maintainance?) Is the marker the scene of any "rituals" such as wreath layings at anniversaries? Are there fresh flowers or recent candles there now?

War memorials can be divided into those which are strictly symbolic - they are strictly memorials like obelisks, statues, plaques, etc. - and those which are utilitarian, i.e., those that have a function such as being a community building, a stadium, a park or something. Those who oppose utilitarian memorials argue that this second use makes people quickly forget that it is in fact a memorial. If you are looking at a utilitarian memorial, ask yourself if it is still a memorial at all. Has it completely lost its commemorative function or is it more than just a ball park?

The memorial section of the Muehlacker/Enz cemetery shown here on the right is typical. Every November, wreaths are presented at war memorials all over Germany. The city presents a wreath, and sometimes the local association of war victims does as well. In the case shown here, however, the local Italian community also presented a wreath of its own!

The photo here (left) of a cemetery for the fallen of World War One was taken right after the German memorial day. It shows that there were people drinking at about the time of the wreath-laying. Champagne?

Does the marker serve the social purpose for which it was probably intended?

If the marker is obviously no longer in "use", it is interesting to contemplate why not. Is it simply the case that markers in general don't work as being constant reminders of whatever it was they supposedly remind us of? Are they, finally, futile? Or do they, in the end, really serve another function - that of disposing of history? What I mean is this: Can we pour history into a concrete obelisk and be done with it? After all, we have done our duty and preserved it. Now we can move on. This idea was a major factor in the debates surrounding the German Holocaust Memorial which was, after 17 years of discussion, finally dedicated in 2005. Some of those who opposed the monument did so not because they didn't like the design or because they didn't want the Holocaust remembered, but because they didn't want the discussion to end! They were afraid that a monument would be a way to set historical memory aside.

In the case of markers set up to represent events that never happened ( such as this example from Idaho) or people that never existed (such as Confederate fallen from Montana, an example from Loewen's book), it is more a case of markers creating history than archiving it, of course.

The military cemetery in Riga shown here was built by the state to commemorate the fallen of the First World War and Latvian War of Independence. It is still used for national memorial ceremonies.

The new Holocaust memorial in Berlin (offsite link), which was was preceded by 17 years of discussion and rancorous debate, had hardly been up for a month when reports started coming in that visitors were not showing the proper piety. They were playing hide-and-seek among the pylons, making out, sitting down, etc.

Has the target audience died off? Or is the message that the marker conveys outdated? Or is it simply uncomfortable and people would rather not think about it? Be careful with that last answer. Are war memorials to fallen heroes really ignored because people don't want to honor the fallen? Or because they don't want to think about the horrors of war? Be hard on yourself, make it interesting and blame the monument: How and why did this war memorial fail to maintain interest in its subject?

Why is there no marker here?

This is related to the location question. Markers are not only put in certain places, but they are also not put in certain places. This is something to bear in mind in situations where you suspect there might be some really interesting history or where you know that there is some interesting history, but find no marker. During the Soviet period, there was no marker to the Riga Jewish ghetto, nor to the Riga concentration camp, nor to the location south of Riga where more than 20,000 Jews were shot. But there was a huge memorial ensemble built at another concnetration camp near Riga at Salaspils. The Soviet regime wanted certain victims and events remembered, and others not, and the locations as well as the themes emphasized in the monument reflect that.

Summary

The point of this whole essay is, in a nutshell, to get you, the visitor to an historical marker, to question the marker and not accept, passivly and without even being aware of it, some intended or unintended "message" offered by that marker. People who build markers do so with intent. Think about that intent. Markers occupy overlapping and complex places in history, not just places in public space. They become most interesting when we actively consider that space.

This is not meant to be cynical. We are looking for an historical approach. By stepping outside yourself for a moment, you are not disrepecting the dead, scorning the tradition, or being impious. Think of it as engaging the monument in a dialogue.

Mark R. Hatlie Tuebingen, Germany
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Recommended Reading

James Loewen, in his fascinating book Lies Across America, gives a detailed account of how monuments come into being, the functions they serve in society, and how inaccurate they often are. His examples, as the title implies, all come from within the United States. His ideas, however, apply to historical markers everywhere. At the end of the book, he gives a list of "Ten questions to ask at an historical site", also available at his webpage. I have modified that list here and given some more detail than he does in his short list. But many of the ideas I use here are also from the more detailed introductory chapters of that book. Anybody interested in a detailed account of the "sociology of historic sites" (how they are made and received) or "the function of public history" should read his account in the opening chapters of his book and the over 100 detailed examples which fill the rest of Lies Across America.

Other literature I would highly recommend for investigating "cultures" of memory, especially with regard to memorializing military conflict, include the following books, from which I have also drawn ideas:

Mosse, George L.: Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Becker, Annette; Adoin-Rouzeau, Stephane; Temerson, Catherine: 14-18 Understanding the Great War. Hill and Wang, 2002.

Winter, Jay: Sites of Memory,Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural Memory. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

For more literature, see the growing list of titles at the resources page.

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Return to Sites of Memory main page. Mark R. Hatlie All the images are linked to more photos and information on the markers shown. Click on the image to go to the marker page. Most all of us are caught unprepared by monuments and memorials, if we notice them at all.