Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863–1921 by Shannon Bontrager (review)

Over the last several years, scholars of American military memory have witnessed an explosion of public interest in the history and legacies of military commemoration in the United States. For this reason, Shannon Bontrager's Death at the Edges of Empire could not have come at a better time. Bontrager provides a compelling new interpretation of American military memory and its entanglement with the growth of American empire that makes it essential reading for scholars of commemoration, memory, and imperialism. Yet, while it will greatly benefit the scholarly audience at which it is aimed, this book likely does not have the potential to reach a general audience, even though it could have productively informed the current national conversations about memorialization.

Sweeping in its scope and ambitious in its aims, Death at the Edges of Empire unpacks the evolution of how Americans remembered the military dead from the Civil War through the end of World War I. Specifically, it examines how the cultural memory of the war dead intersected with the creation of an American empire. Bontrager argues that "the language and practice of death and burial in the military exposed a key landscape where agents of nation and empire collaborated to define who belonged within the criteria of citizenship" (4). As the emerging American traditions for remembering the war dead revealed, full access to citizenship remained restricted based on race, religion, and gender both in the United States and in places enmeshed within America's empire. Especially as the United States fought more wars abroad, the care of the war dead provided an opportunity to project American power overseas and demonstrate who would be accepted into the body politic. Central to Bontrager's argument is the concept of "Lincoln's promise," the idea that in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln created a new obligation for the United States to honor and care for its military fatalities. Bontrager interprets this tradition as encompassing three techniques of remembrance—storage, retrieval, and communication—which he bases on the work of Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist and leading theorist of cultural memory.

Accordingly, the book is divided into three parts, categorized by storage, retrieval, and communication. Within each part, the chapters are organized chronologically, and each has a unique thematic focus. While the chapter titles suggest broadness, the chapters are actually more narrow and often feature engrossing case studies or comparisons, such as examinations of Marietta National Cemetery in Georgia and Sitka National Cemetery in Alaska. In particular, chapter 4, "Retrieve the Maine!," provides an excellent, long-overdue examination of the effort to raise the USS Maine and bury the ship's dead, exemplifying Bontrager's central argument. The retrieval of the Maine's fatalities and their burial near its recovered mast at Arlington National Cemetery aided the process of reconciliation after the Civil War while also obscuring the imperialist aspects of the Spanish-American War with nationalistic memory rituals. Chapters 6 and 7, however, somewhat stray from the book's focus on the bodies of the war dead. Chapter 6 examines the wartime experiences and subsequent commemoration of Arthur Bluethenthal, a Jewish North Carolinian who died serving with the Lafayette Flying Corps. To Bontrager, Bluethenthal represents how an imperial power could integrate some minorities, such as Jewish people, into cultural memory while excluding others. Chapter 7 analyzes the creation of North Carolina's official World War I archival collection, arguing that it demonstrates how the state used the collection to "adapt cultural memory to new techniques" (218). While contributing to Bontrager's citizenship themes, both chapters 6 and 7 focus more on cultural memory writ large and less on the specific memory of the bodies of the war dead.

This lost focus toward the last third of the book is representative of one of its overall shortcomings: it...