Search

While the middle- and upper-class is typically cast as using museum patronage to support narratives that reinforce the position of dominant racial groups, this paper presents an alternative perspective. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, I conceptually and empirically elaborate how gifts by black middle- and upper-class voluntary organizations to African American museums are enabled by racial uplift ideology and directed at nurturing counter-narratives about African Americans. As patrons of memory they aim to reconstitute recollections of African Americans by challenging master narratives of national life where they are either absent or marginalized. Gifts to black museums also support the inclusion of their own organizations and members as protagonists in this counter-memory. By turning attention to cultural patronage among black middle- and upper-class voluntary organizations, this paper demonstrates how museum patronage among elites can unsettle, rather than reinforce, master racial narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of an American diaspora has become increasingly salient among the minority of Ulster Protestants who ascribe to the "Ulster-Scots" ethnic identity in Northern Ireland. Especially in light of the well-established conception of an Irish-American diaspora, the effort Ulster's "Protestant community" to construct and delineate a separate, non-Irish genealogical diaspora reveals much about their collective self-conceptions and aspirations. In this paper, I argue that the descriptions of Ulster-Scots-American diaspora represent both means of recasting "their" actions and ideologies as ethnically predestined, and an attempt to regain a sense of collective dignity in light of palpable postbellum defeatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the first decade of this century, public monuments to the memory of "comfort women" - women and girls forced into sexual service from the 1930s through 1945, by the Japanese Imperial Army - have been established in the United States by the Korean diaspora. This paper analyses recent memorials in the suburbs of New York that have experienced rapid immigration from Korea since the 1990s. The memorials met local resistance due to perceptions of unrelatedness to the American land. Such immigrant initiatives, however, have been supported by municipal governance. The project of inscribing a passage from East Asian history in the American context may be considered symptomatic of wider cognitive and social shifts in immigrant adaptation. Assimilation through the inclusion of immigrant heritage, along with an increasing sense of entitlement in being both "ethnic" and "American", have been integral to this contest regarding collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1863 and 1868, over 9000 Native Americans were interned under US military guard at the Bosque Redondo reservation in New Mexico. The objectives for internment were to end Indian raids of military forts and to assimilate native people. The prisoners' survival despite inhumane conditions is now commemorated at the Bosque Redondo Memorial, which opened to the public in 2004. This paper recounts the history of the site before it was a memorial, exploring why such designation was not established sooner, and it addresses the aspiration for the Memorial to become an accredited member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes novel use of digital archives and the history of publishing to reveal the previously unknown author of the first cookbook published by avonian in the Carolinas. The traditional tools of the culinary historian, including textual analysis and biogiaphical research, proved insufficient to identify the author of the Carolina Receipt 1300k (1832,). The researchers therefo, situated the cookbook within the social and intellectual milieu of antebellum Charleston—not only the traditional female networks of domestic literature and charitable works, but also the masculine politics of Nullification, slavery and states' rights, which led ultimately to the Civil War. The paper analyzes how an elite Southern family sought to erase the historical memory of the volume in order to assure cultural predominance for its own female members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the collective mnemonics embedded in the statistical discourse of Planned Parenthood's 1955 conference, Abortion in the United States. Conferees recalled a culture that was diseased, remembered both through social data on abortion pathology and epidemiology. The essay conceptualizes how to think of social data as a collective memory of secrets that is incumbent to biopower, particularly regarding statistical anonymity as a form of strategic amnesia. Although primarily a study of this conference, the essay notes the broader importance of collective memory and secrecy for the study of biopower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores contested memories of place in the historical recovery and community revitalization of Salinas, California's old Chinatown. For over a century, Chinatown has been home to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Mexicans. Today, it is occupied by the homeless, drug dealers, and addicts. Chinatown is variously remembered as the site of the best Chinese food in town, a place of gambling and prostitution, and “home.” Oral histories reveal multiple and contested significations of place: from intensely nostalgic recollections that mythify the past to distanced accounts that reveal little attachment to place. Narratives shed light on the tensions involved in cultural recovery and negotiating spatial claims across ethnic and cultural groups, generations, and social classes. Accounts also reveal how the restoration of lost community history can generate new coalitional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the bicentenary of the banning of the international slave trade by Great Britain and the United States, this paper looks at the way in which the history of slavery has been under-represented and erased in Charleston, SC, the single most important port of entry for enslaved Africans into continental North America prior to 1808. Although current efforts to commemorate slavery and its abolition in the area are encouraging, recent disputes on the waterfront in Charleston reveal how the Atlantic remains haunted by a racialized economic hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts a century of competition among American Protestants over the Pilgrims' legacy. The tug-of-war began in the 1820s, pitting Congregationalists against Unitarians, and grew to include other denominations with fewer reasons to celebrate the original Plymouth settlers, from Episcopalians and Baptists to Quakers and the AME Zion. It culminated in 1920, when ecumenists upheld a band of dissenting separatists as the true architects of Christian unity. This article argues that all of the back-and-forth helped to create American Protestant denominationalism, fine-tuning a competitive and often unwieldy system and providing a regular practice in the human intricacies of religious pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matyjaszek's article discusses a set of reactions by Polish émigré cultural and political activists in the United States to the screening of the NBC television series Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss on 16–19 April 1978. It offers an analysis of the emergence of Holocaust history as a source of collective identity and memory in western societies, and as a part of popular culture. The end of the 1970s witnessed a series of cultural and political events as well as the publication of scholarly texts that put images of the mass murder of the European Jews at the centre of North American and global debates on identity and history as well as their political uses. In his analysis of reactions by Polish intellectuals and community leaders, Matyjaszek examines the cultural position of members of the post-war Central-Eastern European intelligentsia in the United States, both in relation to their own reference group's painful and violent history, and to their position within the North American society of the time. In a critical evaluation of contemporary uses of the concepts of 'bystander' and 'survivor' with regard to the Holocaust, he focuses on a set of documents stored in the private archive of Jan Nowak-Jeziorański (Ossoliński Institute, Wrocław, Poland), as well as on published documents and correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can blatantly racist-nationalist imageries that are literally carved into stone be recast as inclusionary? Can it be 're-seen' without being remodeled? By whose eyes and under what conditions? This essay examines the uneven development of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial in the United States. It questions how the impulse to memorialize in the aftermath of war and then re-memorialize relates to conflicts over the legacies of US slavery and the Civil War. Increasingly, these struggles over representations of divisive histories are waged alongside a growing heritage tourist industry and in the context ongoing racial conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation process by analyzing both the dominant and vernacular discourses that emerged in response to eight black churches that were burned in a ten-day period following the June 2015 AME church massacre. I also consider how these vernacular rhetorics mobilize fugitive fragments from what Karma Chávez calls the "undercommonsense" to form a survival discourse and what possibilities those radical (from Latin radix, "root") meaning-making practices may hold. This essay advances communication studies scholarship by connecting discursive approaches to race and racism with rhetorical scholarship on fragmentation, ideology, and public memory. It offers a vocabulary for confronting civil society's material rhetorics that mask the material realities of racism and racial oppression, and calls for rhetoricians to take seriously the common-sense racism that perpetuates these dynamics and how it might be revised or contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine the relationship between soccer culture and the vernacular region of Cascadia. Specifically, we consider how supporters of the Portland Timbers, Seattle Sounders and Vancouver Whitecaps mobilize the bioregional narrative of Cascadia. This Cascadian narrative helps to solidify supporter culture and identity by fostering a connection between supporters and place. As a result, soccer has also become one conduit through which ideas about Cascadia are constructed, experienced and communicated. In this way, ideas about Cascadia help to construct regional and local soccer cultures in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver and in turn, those soccer cultures help to construct and promote Cascadia. We examine three aspects of this situation: the formation of the Cascadia Football Federation, the Cascadia Cup Controversy and the use of Cascadian iconography by supporters of the aforementioned clubs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses U.S. historiography on, and collective memory of, World War I, also referred to as the forgotten war. It examines the depiction of World War I in U.S. popular culture such as literature and motion pictures, World War I in U.S. political culture, particularly concerning the Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages and the Bonus March of World War I veterans during the Great Depression, and scholarly analysis of the reasons for the U.S. entering World War I. It also discusses the military history of World War I.

Much has been written about how the journalistic community relies on the collective memory of past accomplishments to bolster its cultural authority. Similarly, researchers have analyzed how journalists react to accusations of professional deviancy within their ranks to mitigate the damage to their overall standing. This study fills a gap where these two areas of research intersect by analyzing how journalists reinvigorate memories of past misconduct through engaging new occurrences. By examining metajournalistic discourse surrounding offenders, this study examines how incidents of deviance become embedded as particular symbols in the collective understanding of journalism. The analysis tracks the memory of six prominent cases of journalistic misconduct in the United States to demonstrate how the journalistic community turns to past episodes of professional deviancy to make sense of itself in the face of emerging tensions. These findings suggest the need to broaden an understanding of collective memory to include negative memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the intervention of queer rhetorical pedagogy through former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in the K-12 educational system. The collective memory of Lincoln is described as queer in two different senses. This pedagogy is expected to influence the lives of children on the country. Also discussed is the impact of configuring Lincoln as queer on LGBTQ students.

Rural communities in the United States have faced mounting pressure to develop their local economies in ways that threaten their historic agrarian landscapes and cultural practices. However, these communities are often wary of, if not hostile to, top-down approaches to historic preservation and landscape conservation. Community-engaged heritage protection strategies shift the focus from managing cultural and natural heritage as discrete resources to envisioning heritage and its protection as a form of community development. This paper presents a case study from rural New England in which the intergenerational sharing of narratives about heritage landscapes moves beyond simply commemorating the past, to contributing to the present and future welfare of community members. In this case, heritage narratives shed light on residents' changed relationships toward their land and each other, while also revitalizing a sense of a collective past and, more importantly, a shared future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis followed print newspaper coverage of Butler, Tennessee, to determine the stability and change of historical memory. Utilizing longitudinal analysis, it examines the historical narrative over time using local, regional, and national print coverage. The study determines that historical memory is modified over time in national, regional, and local print outlets, and that media play a pivotal role in the change process. The study concludes that media, particularly local media, often determine source perspective that leads to narrative modifications, thus "changing" memories of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined histories of the American Revolution published through 1899 to see how they used newspapers and magazines as sources. The purpose was to determine how the press helped build America's first real "story"as an independent nation, distinct from native and colonial origins. These histories used press sources in myriad ways. Some included snippets of Revolution-era newspaper content, and others reprinted reminiscences, coverage of anniversaries and monument dedications, and obituaries. And some of the longer and more colourful accounts came verbatim from newspaper articles published decades after the war. Press stories, included in these more permanent histories, helped ensure that the iconic narratives endured in American collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the relationship between epideictic discourse and war through the analysis of George W. Bush's August 20, 2005, address at the Naval Air Station near San Diego, ostensibly to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan. The case also serves as an exemplar for how Bush routinely interwove epideictic appeals with collective memories of World War II in order to promote the Iraq war and deflect criticism of his policies there. Bush praised the greatest generation and linked it to the current generation; blamed and dehumanized enemies of the past and present; advocated for war based on 'lessons' from the past; and reinforced a shared identity to instill both obligation and confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the construction of a National Monument honoring the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of volunteer U.S. soldiers who fought in the Spanish Civil War for Spain's Republican forces, in San Francisco, California, with emphasis given to the meaning associated with the structure's erection by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB). Therefore, the author is broadly interested in the relationship between historical commemoration and collective memory. More specifically, the article investigates how members of the VALB interpret the Brigade's efforts as an aspect of American, and not necessarily international or Spanish, history, thereby employing varying notions of U.S. nationalism and Internationalism in discussions on the monument's importance.

Two American Revolutionary War era homes, now historic houses and sites for archaeological research, in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, serve as starting points for a consideration of memory, narrative and history. These are both sites where early nineteenth-century women made history, mapping the political and military history of the American Revolution onto the domestic fabric of their homes by telling the stories of their recent ancestors, naming rooms and preserving furnishings. In their preservation efforts, these women may not have been primarily focused on telling their own stories, but they made an important statement on the role of domestic spaces in national history and for their own power as history makers. Through material and textual instruments of memory, these women transformed their individual memories into shared narratives, illuminating the process by which a 'social memory' of the Revolution was created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ward explores the diverse ways in which memories, understandings and misunderstandings of the 1960s were mobilized during the 2008 election cycle. At the time, Barack Obama's campaign and triumph were hailed by many as marking a series of a decisive breaks with the past, notably with the culture wars and fiercely ideological political partisanship unleashed in the late 1960s. Others suggested that Obama represented a new kind of candidate who somehow transcended, or might even heal, the racial divisions in the United States, in a fanciful vogue for 'post-racialism' that Ward argues was also connected to popular conceptions of the 1960s and, in particular, to a misreading of the social philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr and his 'I Have a Dream' speech. While some commentators stressed rupture and discontinuity with the past in interpreting Obama's victory, others-friend and foe alike-were keen to stress continuities with the past, often explicitly with a 1960s routinely, if simplistically, parsed into 'good' early and 'bad' later periods. ThusWard considers Obama's connections to the civil rights and black power movements, as well as to other 1960s organizing traditions, charismatic leaders and conceptions of federal government, arguing that the decade continues to offer an important, if ambiguous touchstone in contemporary American politics and social memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often hailed as the greatest player of the Dead-Ball Era, Ty Cobb was the focus of extensive media coverage throughout the twentieth century. This article explores the intersection of popular culture and collective memory by examining the press' participation in the shifting legacy of one of baseball's legendary (anti-) heroes. One question guided the narrative: how did the Sporting News and the Atlanta Constitution represent him throughout the century? Overall, more than 325 articles were analyzed from Sporting News, a prominent national periodical, and the Atlanta Constitution, a prominent newspaper in Cobb's home state, in four twentieth-century eras. The study not only explored the transformation of his legacy in print but grappled with print as a site of public memory, the mechanisms through which public memory is invoked, and the interaction of national and local memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent attention, the Korean War (1950-53) remains underappreciated and further explanation of its 'forgottenness' is needed. Korea originally faded to gray because there was no satisfying victory. National security planners had ample reason to try and rehabilitate the war in the mind of the public, but had little success. This was because a primary accomplishment of the second half of the war - forcing the enemy to accept so-called voluntary repatriation of POWs (prisoners of war) - was semi-secret and never declared as a major war aim. Since the nation was never united around securing voluntary repatriation, there was little raw material for creating a memory of success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of post-World War II political refugees from Latvia in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s uses data from American and Latvian periodicals, printed materials and archival records to uncover the complexities in small immigrant groups' collective memory, political position and relations with the dominant group. When a number of Latvians were accused by the Office of Special Investigations of having lied on their immigration forms about their collaboration with the Nazis, this story gained political undertones and propelled the emigre community into an intra-group debate over its history and public image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceiving of the visual as a significant force in the production and dissemination of collective memory, we argue that a new genre of World War Two films has recently emerged that form part of a new discursive “regime of memory” about the war and those that fought and lived through it, constituting a commemoration as much about reflecting on the present as it is about remembering the past. First, we argue that these films seek to reaffirm a (particular conception of a) US national identity and military patriotism in the post-Cold War era by importing World War Two as the key meta-narrative of America's relationship to war in order to “correct” and help “erase” Vietnam's more negative discursive rendering. Second, we argue that these films attempt to rewrite the history of World War Two by elevating and illuminating the role of the US at the expense of the Allies, further serving to reaffirm America's position of political and military dominance in the current age, and third, that these films form part of a celebration of the generation that fought World War Two, which may accord them a position of nostalgic and sentimental greatness, as their collective spirit and notions of duty and service shine against the foil of what might frequently be seen as our own present moral ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 1861 editor James D.B. De Bow advocated the secession of southern states from the union as he proclaimed to his readers that white Southerners “are mainly the descendants of those who fought the battles of the Revolution, and who understand and appreciate the nature and inestimable value of the liberty which it brought.” While editors on both sides of the Sectional Crisis over slavery in the 1850s and 60s claimed to be “custodians of the legacy of 1776” as they used the American Revolution symbolically in their rhetoric. By focusing on De Bow's Review, a widely read and influential journal during this fight, we can gain a better understanding of the specific terms by which Southerners were encouraged to think of themselves not as rebels but as guardians of “the true American character.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the salience of collective 'memory' and 'remembering' among a group of students in Hip-Hop Lit, a hip-hop centered English literature course that I co-taught at 'Howard High School,' an urban high school in the Northeastern United States. Specifically, this article examines the memory work that occurred within Hip-Hop Lit in response to the students' interactions with one of the course texts, Things Done Changed by rapper Notorious B.I.G. From this and other classroom texts, students were able to construct, contest, and reinscribe memories about the past. Through these memories, students were able to reaffirm and challenge particular social identities that informed and reflected their lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the ways in which the United States 'forgets' the consequences and effects of its foreign policy in the making of its identity. In particular, the article argues that such forgetting enables the United States government to frame its interventions in world affairs as innocent and morally driven. Literature on collective memory and the forgetting that enables the production of such memory informs one element of the argument. Three contemporary films from the amnesia genre are analysed to provide insights into the kind of American identity forged in the acts of remembering and forgetting, illustrating the argument that remembering and forgetting are complex, voluntary and at times mendacious processes. The article concludes with the observation that the processes of forgetting past action when framing the context of new interventions make the United States a dangerous force in global affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the impact of slavery on the lives of the formerly enslaved and their descendants in the black communities of the upper Midwest and explores contested memories of slavery and emancipation in three sites of cultural production: Emancipation Day celebrations, obituaries, and postbellum slave narratives. The essay finds that the formerly-enslaved and their descendants grappled with a national legacy of slavery in memory and commemoration, in public memorials to private suffering, and by recalling, revisiting, and inscribed on community remembrance and national history the traumas of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korea is Japan's most logical ally in East Asia. Both nations share the same primary military benefactor, the United States. Their geographic proximity makes them natural allies in offsetting China's growing power and unknown intentions. In spite of the many reasons to ally, relations remain strained, primarily because of Japan's historical occupation of Korea. In this article, the authors examine the political issues that must be resolved for Japan and South Korea to work together and the potential for such reconciliation in light of South Korea's on-again/off-again drift away from the United States and Japan's open embrace of U.S. protection and occasional political distancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proslavery propagandists developed a standard line on the domestic slave trade: the trade was of only marginal importance to the system of slavery, and the trader was an outcast. In recent decades, historians have recognised a strong propaganda element in this position but - even in recent specialist studies of the trade - the assumption has been that notions of paternalism must have caused owners to feel a measure of unease in dealing with the trader. The present study brings new evidence to dispute this assumption and suggests that traders found no difficulty in being accepted as respected citizens of the Old South. The essay points to two key elements in the proslavery position on the trade - first, the notion of the trader as outcast, and second the concept that black people were not capable of deep and lasting emotional suffering. The 'trader as outcast' operated at the level of propaganda and was not really believed: the concept of superficial black emotions operated at a deeper level and was internalised by owners. Notions about shallow black emotions allowed slaveholders to break up families and to deal comfortably with the trader while still maintaining a self-image as benevolent paternalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the portrayal of prisons in art and popular culture as described by the artist Ashley Hunt. It comments on prisons in television programs and discusses the fact that prisons are hidden geographically which parallels the collective unconscious of U.S. culture regarding punishment. The fact that art can visually portray this unconscious is explored.

In this article, I examine configurations of space and time in memory texts written by men and women who lived at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. These accounts each use somewhat different parameters to frame their recollections, drawing attention to the gendered hierarchy of space-times involved in the work of the Manhattan Project. Despite their heterogeneous authors and motivations, however, these frameworks circumscribe memories within a narrow time and space - the physical boundaries of the Los Alamos site and the frantic tempo of wartime work. In this way, they construct a collective memory of Los Alamos that overlooks the broader spaces and times within which the development of the atomic bomb was situated. Far from being neutral, like dates on a calendar or coordinates on a map, space and time function ideologically to shape memories in ways that support the ideological interests of scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the circumstances under which the concept of mémoire ouvrière has emerged in France and its relation to a change in the conception of history as well as the status of the historian. It presents the debate that centered on the meaning and function of the research into workers’ memory and the specificity of its object. Its approach is comparative: though focusing on research done in France it refers to Great Britain, Italy and the U.S. Differences in workers’ memories according to trades, traditions and national experiences are analyzed. And so is the relationship between workers’ memory and labor organizations: it is seen to be deeply political but not one‐sided as is often claimed. La Mémoire ouvrière cannot be dissociated from workers’ consciousness, class identity and from the purposefulness of memory. Finally, the article stresses the ambiguities and contradictions faced by the attempt to recapture workers’ memory in an academic research context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]