Our Memorials, Ourselves

As I write this essay, controversies about public space and historical commemoration lead the daily news. The so-called Ground Zero mosque has incited furor over the potential violation of "hallowed ground." Glenn Beck has occupied the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. In both cases, the central issue that concerns the books under review here—the nature of public engagement that coalesces around acts of historical memory—has been brought to the fore. These books represent some of the most recent American studies scholarship on the collective memorialization of the past—scholarship that seeks not to understand that past itself better but to ask what commemoration reveals about the present and future of civic engagement. This line of scholarship is often referred to as working in the field of "history and memory," though I prefer the rubric "critical public history" to emphasize its engagement with acts of memorialization in the public sphere. The premise of this scholarship has been powerfully demonstrated by both the Cordoba House controversy and the Beck rally: our decisions about historical commemoration become contentious because they so often serve contradictory notions about the nature of the body politic. In a way, the headlines of this past August could not have provided a better script for the reading of this scholarship on public history.

Yet this same turn of current events also serves as a depressing reminder about the current place of American studies scholarship among nonacademic publics. American studies can now claim a substantial cadre of scholars who have written extensively about historical commemoration in the United States, and doubtless recent events will be fodder for conference papers for years to come. Yet none of this expertise has been able to shape—or even to penetrate—the swamp of mass media of the contemporary United States. From Ed Linenthal's Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991) to Erika Doss's Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America—released the very month that the Islamic center controversy hit the front pages—American studies has been producing an increasingly sophisticated and nuanced body of scholarship that addresses the disputes over historical commemoration and public space in the United States. Perhaps it is too much to ask Bill O'Reilly to book Linenthal or Doss for their insights at moments like these. But why should it be?¹

This gap between what scholarship about the public sphere has to offer and the influence of that scholarship on the public sphere matters, and not simply because the United States could profit from the knowledge of individual scholars on the questions that divide them here. The scholarship on historical commemoration cuts to the core purposes of American studies: it is relentlessly interdisciplinary (or should be), it addresses questions of national belonging and exclusion, and it actively imagines new modes of civic participation. Yet if this scholarship is capable solely of reacting to the public debates about collective memory—rather than participating in, let alone setting the terms of those debates—then what kind of public presence can we actually claim for our discipline? In Memorial Mania, Doss calls for a "critical pedagogy of public feelings—an emotional epistemology—which shrewdly considers how and why (and which) public feelings shape historical monuments, concepts of citizenship, and understandings of self and...