Commemorative Stamps

Pickett's Charge in History and Memory, By Carol Reardon, University of North Carolina Press, 1997

Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, By Kirk Savage, Princeton University Press, 1997

Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, By Kenneth E. Foote, University of Texas Press, 1997

Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies, By Sanford Levinson, Duke University Press, 1998

The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling, By Milton J. Bates, University of California Press, 1996

The divi-divi trees on Aruba grow only to one side, to the west. Gnarled and beset in unsheltered soil, they are tugged by the trade winds that sweep in from the northeast and that are tugged, in turn, by the force of the earth's rotation. Rumor has it that divi-divis can grow straight and true in tended hotel courtyards for the visitors who arrive daily, but even tourists are drawn to the near iconic twist in the wind that blows steadily toward the international dateline and a sudden tomorrow. On Aruba, as in the backward glance of these five volumes on commemorative practices, an insistent wind blows almost invisibly toward the future.

It is the shared task of these several studies to chart the commemorative winds that have reshaped the past, especially particular pasts in particular places like Gettysburg, Washington, San Antonio, Richmond, and Chu Lai. In assembling their archives, some of these scholars hanker after Aruba's courtyard truth and a dispassionate objectivity as they describe chaotic events and subsequent efforts to reckon with trauma. But since their common focus is commemoration, always in these volumes a public and protracted process by definition, they all finally tell the story of the wind, which is the story of conflicting interests, differing allegiances, and buffeted contest. The wind can come from different quarters, however, as scholarly disciplines shift the vectors of analysis. Historian Carol Reardon traces the glory of a disastrous charge to the later agendas of the Richmond press and Virginia's historical associations, while art historian Kirk Savage discovers the failure of emancipation in the postwar disinclination to revise sculpture's race-bound poses. Geographer Kenneth E. Foote sees commemorative sites inscribing consensual myths of origin on the American landscape, while legal scholar Sanford Levinson examines the inculcatory function of art against the backdrop of the Constitution's plural "We, the People," and literary critic Milton J. Bates concentrates on a series of social tensions out of which the Vietnam War and stories about US entanglement have inevitably spilled. These differing emphases are instructive, particularly if literary scholars continue to poach on other disciplines and other avenues into public memory and its reconstructive thrust, as well as who has dibs on both.

The malleable legacy of the past depends for all these scholars on history's recorded traces, a respect for archives that actually dates in this country from the end of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment ideal of progress. Prior to that time, as John R. Gillis has pointed out in "Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship" (1994), public histories were less often written and public monuments were less often built when living memory could serve and "heritage" belonged largely to those few who could afford it. ¹ With the rise of nations in the hands of strangers, however, a stalwartly national heritage and one that was "inherently contested," in Gillis's view, had to be crafted on both sides of the Atlantic: "In the case of both the French and American revolutions, the need to commemorate arose directly out of an ideologically driven desire to break with the past, to construct as great a distance as possible between the new age and the old" (8). The interested search for a usable past would be the touchstone of national identity and would be fueled in the US by the spread of literacy, the advent of photography as well as popular engravings, the...