I'm very interested in memory and remembrance, specifically as it applies to history and the formation of an historical consciousness. In April, I presented a paper at the Dakota History Conference at Augustana analyzing the memory behind the massacre at Wounded Knee and the use of that memory by the Indian activists of the American Indian Movement. That presentation is being expanded into an article I will publish in South Dakota History. Anyways, generally speaking, "historical memory" refers to the ways in which a society or people collectively remembers its past, reflecting the "understanding that a specific group of people shares about past events which this group perceives as having shaped its current economic, cultural, social, and political status and identity."[1] Depictions of the past play a crucial role in our contemporary world through public memorials, films, museums, theme parks, and memorialization practices. On this day of remembrance, Paul Richard of the Washington Post has an article entitled "Now, Memory Fails Us," which examines the rise and fall of memorials in Washington, D.C. Excerpt:
Remember, tomorrow's Memorial Day. That's what it's for, remembering.
The holiday's gone blurry. Now it's mostly fun (ballgames, setting up the barbecue, another day off work), but it used to be for focused recollections of the dead.
Not the dead in general, the dead in sharp particular. Half a million soldiers had died in the Civil War. When the rites were first observed in 1866, there were plenty to recall.
Each spring at the end of May, their graves were strewn with flowers, their faces brought to mind. This was deeply serious business. The fallen mustn't be forgotten. We used words like "the fallen" then. That seriousness bred art. That art would shape the country's look, and Washington's especially. Vast amounts of money, artistry and effort would be expended on its making. The beauty of the art would illumine its high purpose -- to immortalize remembrance. Strewn flowers weren't enough. The fallen would be given stone-and-metal monuments impervious to time.
Washington is filled with them. If you want to get Memorial Day, look around at the memorials. They're victors' monuments. They put generals on pedestals, and dead presidents above them. Washington's memorials share a certain style. Their statues aren't just portraits, though they're often that, as well; they're personified ideals. Their bronze laurel wreaths and eagles, and Greco-Roman lions, say: The past approves of us. They're insistently high-minded, august.
They represent an art movement, now dead. For a long time their architects and artists, their stone-carvers and bronze-founders got better and better. For a long time their elevated style got nobler and nobler. Then, suddenly, it died.
It died a poignant death -- at the peak of its accomplishment, just when it got great. We know the date exactly. Memorial sculpture's greatness left Washington forever on the 30th of May, Memorial Day, 1922.
Check out the whole article.
[1] Eric Davis, "The New Iraq: The Uses of Historical Memory" Journal of Democracy, 16:3 (July 2005): 54-68.
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