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Reviewed by:
  • Framing Public Memory
  • Lester C. Olson
Framing Public Memory. Edited by Kendall R. Phillips. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004; pp. viii + 269. $42.50 cloth; $29.95 paper.

This substantive book provides ten evocative, well-written essays by a who's who among contemporary public memory scholars. Framing Public Memory features conceptually driven case studies when the "memory of publics" or the "publicness of memory" was of paramount importance. According to editor Kendall R. Phillips's introduction, these two ways of "unpacking" the notion of "public memory" structure the book's organization into two halves. He is careful to affirm that he does not intend "to suggest that there is some inherent opposition between the essays in each part" (10). Instead, he claims that the first part features the factors of "remembrance/forgetting, authority/resistance, responsibility/absolution," and the latter half foregrounds "appearance/loss, repetition/mutation, hegemony/instability" (10).

The collection is interdisciplinary in that it features philosophical treatments by Edward S. Casey and Charles E. Scott (each of whom writes a general sketch of memory framing one half of the book) alongside several predominantly rhetorical studies of how memory is actively shaped and contested by various competing publics. One quantitative essay, which was coauthored by Horst-Alfred Heinrich and Barry Schwartz, is predominantly sociological in its approach. Otherwise, the essays take a qualitative approach. As for historical periods recollected here, nine of these ten essays concentrate on the twentieth century, the one notable exception being that of Charles E. Morris III, which centers on Abraham Lincoln's life during the nineteenth century. Most of the book features memory within U.S. culture, though there is meaningful engagement with Holocaust memories by Gypsies and by Jews in separate essays by Bradford Vivian and Stephen Howard Browne, respectively, as well as by later generations of Germans and Americans in Heinrich and Schwartz's coauthored contribution. The latter is based on survey research. One would be hard pressed to identify any essay in the volume that deals with uplifting celebrations or jubilant spectacles and reminiscences, concentrating as most essays do on traumatic moments and protracted ordeals: the shootings of students and a police officer on a campus in 1966, unforgettable photographs of terrorists crashing airplanes into the World Trade Center Towers in 2001 and others of people leaping to their deaths in 2004, as well as Stephen Spielburg's gruesome film set during World War II, Saving Private Ryan. [End Page 325]

Among the most interesting essays are case studies by Rosa Eberly concerning the University of Texas Tower shootings and Charles E. Morris III concerning Abe Lincoln's possible homosexuality. Together, they indicate some ways in which disciplines and institutions actively repress or erase certain public memories for such economic reasons as portraying a safe university environment for recruiting prospective students or to sustain "heteronormative" ideals ensconced in the U.S. presidency. Morris underscores how, despite the usual norms of careful and detached engagement with extant primary sources, eminent historians actively objected to any suggestion of honest Lincoln's erotic involvement with Joshua Speed (with whom he shared a bed for four years and had a lifelong, emotionally deep friendship) without needing to pause for even a moment to examine the latter's diary, which had only recently come to light. Setting aside the question of whether Abe actually had a sexual relationship with Speed, Morris concentrates on the decisive, emotionally charged reaction by U.S. citizens and accomplished historians that demonstrates total abandonment of the usual academic standards. Likewise fascinating was Barbie Zelizer's essay on photographic journalism in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York City in which she focused on what she termed a "subjunctive voice of possibility" in "about to die" photographs. The essay adds to her already impressive, decades-long engagement with public memory in which she has previously concentrated on event-driven memory and ruptures in memory (neither of which concept resurfaces here).

Taken together, the entire book constitutes a substantive contribution to the scholarship on public memory, featuring as it does a wealth of concepts that will be useful to public memory scholars in communication, rhetoric, and public affairs...

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