Notes
Notes Introduction 1. These objectives are outlined by former National Park Service assistant director Robert M. Utley in Edward Linenthal’s Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), ix–x. 2. As of December 2007. A complete list of Park Service sites can be found on the National Park Service home page at http://www.nps.gov (accessed April 30,2012). 3. Rhetorical scholars in particular have begun in recent years to debunk the seemingly transparent and universal messages contained in Park Service preservation of historic and natural spaces of national significance, while scholars in the fields of social, public, and environmental history have tended to judge the Park Service according to the agency’s own preservation standards. Environmental scholars have analyzed deeper meanings constituted through the Park Service’s preservation of its “natural” parks like yosemite and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. See, for example, Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imaging Nature :yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 241–60; and Bruce Weaver, “What to Do with the Mountain People? The Darker Side of the Successful Campaign to Establish the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” in The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment, ed. James G. Cantrill and Christine L. oravec (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996). Rhetorical scholars have also turned their attention to the critical analysis of historical memory sites, some of which are preserved and interpreted by the Park Service. See, for example, Bernard J. Armada, “Memorial Agon: An Interpretive Tour of the National Civil Rights Museum,” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998): 235–43; Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity:The vietnam veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 263–88; Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial,” in At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, ed. Thomas Rosteck (New york: Guilford, 1999), 29–83; Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights 162 / Notes to Pages 2–3 Memorial,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (1999): 31–55; A. Cheree Carlson and John E. Hocking, “Strategies of Redemption at the vietnam veterans’ Memorial,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 52 (1988):203–15;victoria J.Gallagher,“Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (1999): 303–20;victoria J. Gallagher, “Remembering Together: Rhetorical Integration and the Case of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial,” Southern Communication Journal 60 (1995): 109–19; Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp and Lori A. Lanzilotti , “Public Memory and Private Grief: The Construction of Shrines at the Sites of Public Tragedy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 150–70; and Elizabethada A. Wright, “Rhetorical Spaces in Memorial Places: The Cemetery as a Rhetorical Memory Place/Space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 51–81. 4. Quoted in Linenthal, Sacred Ground, x. 5. Much of this scholarship describes Park Service forays into natural preservation , which preceded historical preservation and interpretation by about twentyfive years. See William C. Everhart, The National Park Service (Boulder, Co:Westview Press,1983);and Alfred Runte,National Parks:TheAmerican Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). Scholarship on Park Service historical sites outside the field of rhetorical studies also appears to emphasize preservation over interpretation by chronicling how the argumentative tension between preservation and economic growth has been managed in different disputes involving the Park Service. See, for example, Georgie Boge and Margie Holder Boge, Paving Over the Past:A History and Guide to CivilWar Battlefield Preservation (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); and frances H. Kennedy, Dollar$ and Sense of Battlefield Preservation:The Economic Benefits of Protecting Civil War Battlefields (Washington, DC: Preservation Press, 1994). 6. Popular critiques of the Park Service have tended to adopt the Park Service’s own criteria of emphasizing the accuracy of preservation efforts. See, for example, James W. Loewen, Lies across America:What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (Newyork: New Press, 1999). 7. I have in mind here much of Carole Blair’s work on commemorative monuments and memorials. Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci, “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity ”; Blair and Michel, “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone”; Blair and Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics.” My understanding of a rhetorical approach to public memory is informed by Stephen Browne’s observation that “to understand public memory, is to first understand the symbolic processes through which it is constructed...
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