“You Can’t Change History”—Unless by Misremembering

Erika Doss (American Studies, University of Notre Dame) wonders “why do we make memorials in America today—and why do we make so many of them” (p. 1). The word “today” appears often and is one key to comprehending and appreciating her project, because she deals largely with permanent and temporary memorials from the past twenty-five years, along with quite a few that have been planned, even authorized, yet remain unbuilt or incomplete because of contestation or lack of funds. The book is not unhistorical, however, because, wherever needed or appropriate, she refers back to memorials from the late nineteenth century onward in order to highlight discontinuities of style and motivation caused by political or cultural change. Sites and people afflicted by terrorist attacks, primarily a phenomenon less than two decades old, occupy much of Doss’ attention. Memorials prompted by the events of September 11, 2001, prick the national landscape like a full pin-cushion, not just in Lower Manhattan, the Pentagon, and at Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The book is remarkable in several respects. First, it is meticulously thorough, almost to a fault. The author mentions and describes a great many memorials, extant and planned, that will be unfamiliar to many. The author’s choice of “mania” sends a clear message that there is now an obsessive proliferation, and as it happens, at vast expense. Memorials are costly, and at times it feels as though involved parties think that the persons or events being memorialized would be shamefully degraded unless the fund-raising challenge for a project turned out to be mind-boggling in scope.

Second, the book is organized topically, which certainly makes sense as an alternative to plowing along in chronological order, which would have been tedious and would have made explanatory efforts to determine similarities and differences much more difficult to highlight. The net effect, however, perhaps inevitably, is a considerable amount of repetition and the somewhat jarring revisitation of various sites, as they illustrate subcategories of Doss’ larger rubrics that define chapters. Following a historical overview chapter that sweeps from “Statue Mania to Memorial Mania” (mainly 1870s to the 1920s), Doss turns to grief, fear, gratitude, shame, and anger as categories of analysis, each with multiple exemplars. Some cases might very well have been placed in a different chapter, but that is allayed by redeploying episodes whose primary treatment occurs in one place but can also be helpfully illustrative of a key point or rubric elsewhere.

The “Grief” chapter highlights the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado (1999) and the Oklahoma City Memory Fence (1995), but also the National Memorial for the Unborn, Wall of Names, in Chattanooga (1994) and the National [organ] Donor Memorial in Richmond (2003). Some I knew about and some I didn’t. The “Fear” chapter begins with the Lockerbie Memorial Cairn at Arlington National Cemetery and thoughtfully explores “terrorism memorials and security narratives.” In addition to the 9/11 memorials, there is a fine discussion of the new phenomenon that Doss calls “tragic tourism” and an illuminating explanation of why minimalism has become the preferred style for memorials ever since the stunning success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., gradually after 1982.

Chapter four, “Gratitude,” has much to say about the World War II Memorial in Washington (2004) and makes the important point that it was by no means the first, as so many veterans and journalists insisted during the 1990s and millennium years. There had been many “lesser” ones, beginning with the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington (1954). Perhaps understandably, expectations grew that there needed to be a very lavish one located prominently on the Mall, larger than a football field, rather than, as first planned, “obscurely” situated near the Vietnam Memorial (the most widely visited of any in the country).

Chapter five, “Shame,” places the greatest emphasis on atrocities committed against American minority groups: African Americans, Indians, and especially the Japanese internment camps during...