Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy

Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (1997)
By Kenneth E. Foote

Synopsis: This book investigates the ways Americans deal with violent/tragic events, and the way they choose to remember or forget them. The book quotes Lowenthal in saying "memory not only conserves the past but adjusts recall to current needs" (5). Asks: How do Americans view and interpret the past? In order to get to this, the author examines site of such turmoils as war, mass murders, political assassinations, violent labor and race riots, transportation accidents, fires, floods, and explosions. The book argues that there are four ways tragedies are dealt with: 1) sanctification ( events hold lasting positive meaning that people want to remember - i.e. heroism or great sacrifice - often marked by a memorial or monument, a "sacred place"); (2) designation (sites marked bu not sanctified, may lack "heroic" qualities; a kind of limbo/transitional position; Lorraine Motel - MLK site, later sanctified); 3) rectification ("the process through which a tragedy site is put right and used again;" is what happens to most sites of violence - i.e. murders, plane crashes); 4) obliteration (actively effacing all evidence to cover up or remove from view due to high sense of shame). Basically demonstrates that there is a continuous struggle over meaning and over ways of remembering; some mark ways for communities to come together and heal, some are ways of remembering change and changing needs of the time. What we choose not to remember or mark is just as important as what we do.

Interacts With:

Lowenthal,
Any works that deal with the contested nature of landscape, and/or that show present concerns can influence the way the past is dealt with.

The Mezzanine

The Mezzanine (1986)
by Nicholson Baker

Synopsis: This is the only novel on my list! It's about the superficial and symbol-laden materiality of modern life. The story follows a man as he journeys on the escalator up to his office on the mezzanine. It's composed entirely of his random and in-depth observations of the most minute details of everyday social rituals and material culture, and is punctuated by footnotes which elaborately expand on i.e. the mechanics and materials of drinking straws. Book often links material details to nostalgic memories and childhood; adulthood, nostalgia, and memory are recurrent themes. The book is obsessed with materiality - with the texture, look, and feel of things, especially paper vs. plastic, and various containers of all sorts. The most microscopic details are discussed and pondered upon in depth, giving a portrait of the "weightlessness" of modern culture and the way we've been forced to sublimate all sense of purpose and meaning onto the ridiculous aesthetic and material conditions that intrude on us in every moment. His descriptions are detailed and witty and sometimes hilarious, and although its style is more "postmodern," it's really about the banality of modernity, as machines and technology and artificiality figure prominently.

Interesting Specifics:

Good example of the narcissism of small details; collection of "microhistories."

"Why do these images have to age before we can be fond of them?" (78). This is a common theme - the importance of distance and nostalgia in producing a sense of fondness or importance.

Concerned with microscopic instances of the "renewal of newness" - like the appearance of another plastic cup when you pull one from the dispenser.

Paper is the nostalgic favorite over plastic.

Interacts With:

Material culture books, Meaning of Things,
No Place of Grace (as connected to the antimodern quest for personal fulfillment, and the banality of an existence focused on minutiae).
de Certeau (focus on the minute details of everyday life)
Monochrome Memories
Flight Maps, American Plastic (idea that plastic represents the fake)

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (1998
By Jill Lepore

Synopsis: This book is a study of war, and the ways in which people write about it. It looks at the way war is remembered and how its documentation and discussion is subject to who is doing the narration and what purpose the narration is supposed to serve. Lepore does this by following different understandings and interpretations of Kin Philip's War, and the way language was used to control meaning. Basic argument is that: "...wounds and word - the injuries and their interpretation - cannot be separated, that acts of war generate acts of narrations, and that both types of acts are often joined in a common purpose: defining the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples" (x). KP's war was the war waged on NE colonists started by "King Philip," Chief of the Wamanoags, to prevent the Puritans from completely taking over. Says NEs didn't even search for an NA motive, and instead just marked NA behavior as "savage," and started telling tales of their "savagery" in order to increase their own distance from them (culturally). In 1776 or so, KPW was used as anti-English Revolutionary rhetoric (i.e. as proof of English savagery), and was again used in the 1820s to hasten Indian Removal, and then was also later used again as stage actors utilized Indianness as "Americanness."

Interesting Specifics:

"The story of King Philip's War...is the story of how English colonists became Americans..." (240).

KPW = 1675-76

KPW was most fatal war in U.S. history.

"If was is, at least in part, a contest for meaning, can it ever be a fair fight when only one side has access to those perfect instruments of empire, pens, paper, and printing press?" (xxi).

The NE colonists wanted to make sure not to appear "Spanish" at all in their dealings with NAs; i.e. they didn't want to be brutal like the Spanish were.

By the late 17th century, "what one owned defined who one was" (76).

Were many plays of KPW; famous American stage actor Edwin Forrest was the most famous to play King Philip, and it was the clash between him and his English rival Charles Macready that sparked the Astor Place riots of 1849.

Interacts With:

Books that talk about shifting meanings of events, and the way events are remembered according to presentist concerns. Meaning of historical events often remains contested.
Culture is malleable.
Cronon (in relation to centrality of property-ownership to colonial identity, and in colonists inability to see different NA way of life as legit).
Horrible Prettiness (just as connects to Astor Place Riots)
One review says this book embodies a very American studies approach, and also shows way KPW helped colonists define themselves as "American" through a contrast with Native American and with the English.

Illuminations

Illuminations (1969)
By Walter Benjamin

Synopsis: This book is a series of essays that span about 15 years, and most are reflections on various cultural components or figures, including Baudelaire, Kafka, and Proust. Also includes a chapter on Benjamin's personal library. Book is most focused on the way history, memory, artifacts, and time together. Underlying all his work is the tension of modernity. In his most famous piece here - "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" - Benjamin argues that the shift from art as steeped in ritual and tradition, to art made solely for mechanical reproduction messes-up the concept of authenticity and also messes with the "aura" of the work. Benjamin is fixated on phenomena and "the wonder of appearance," and seems to be amazed by the way memory and history is embodied. There is a strong sense of loss and longing in his writing, and he seems very concerned with the way human relations and the artifacts between humans have been transformed by modernity. The nineteenth century seems to be more of his place than the twentieth.

Interesting Specifics:

Benjamin loved the flaneur; "To endow this crowd with a soul is the very special purpose of the flaneur" (195).

"The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity" (220).

"All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" (241)

War is a way to mobilize all technological systems while still maintaining the property system (241).

Jew are forbidden in the Torah from investigating the future [is this why Benjamin is so obsessed with the past?].

Interacts With:

Anything on memory its link to material culture/artifacts
Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (1991?)
By Alfred E. Young

Synopsis: Seeks to uncover the role of "common people" in the making of the Revolution, and notes that "this contest for the memory of the Revolution [which] jogs us to think anew about the larger historical process of forgetting and remembering" (xvii). How and why are some events remembered, and how are those events infused with meaning? "What does it mean for an event to be 'lost,' then 'found' and given a new name?" (xvii). Investigates these questions by looking at the life of shoemaker George Robert Twelve Hewes, an ordinary many who was ultimately exalted to hero status (as one of the last survivors of the Tea Party). Examines the two bios of Hewes (1830s) in order to probe Hewes memory and the idea of what is remembered. Draws a bit on scientific studies of memory to discuss personal memory process and connect it with public memory process. Wants to know why the Boston Tea Party didn't come to be called this until the 1830s. Also, why was Hewes exalted? Basically, in the process of remembering, Hewes viewed himself as an equal to his higher-ups, and recalls actually throwing tea overboard with John Hancock during Tea Party, even though Hancock was probably not even there. Notes that interest in Hewes and other "common men" veterans really increased in the 1830s as veterans were being denied pensions; Revolutionary War mythology was also really taking off at that time, though the meaning of the Tea Party and of the Revolution itself was contested. "Tea Party" served both conservatives (making light of the event) and revolutionaries (mocking genteel culture). Bottom line: Public memory is affected by popular events of the time. "The Tea Party, lost, buried, and willfully forgotten in public memory, was recovered in the context of popular movements claiming the Revolution...The Teac Party became an iconic event in public memory because men like Hewes came forward with their private memories" (194).

Interesting Specifics:

Memories are constructed "in the context of...community, broader politics, and social dynamics" (xiv).

Public memory "is what a society remembers collectively" (88).

The Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773, and was the most revolutionary and carnivalesque event of that decade (102). Radical Whig people donned Indian personas.

American history was not taught in schools until 1820s-30s.

"...in a time of upheaval, ordinary people make events possible" (206).

Hewes was only 5'1.

Interacts With:

Kasson (Buffalo Bill book, with its focus on interaction of personal and public memory), Monochrome Memories (Jeff's list), Lowenthal (The Past is a Foreign Country), any book that talks about memory as affected by current needs.