The United States is considered the world's foremost refuge for foreigners, and no place in the nation symbolizes this better than Ellis Island. Through Ellis Island's halls and corridors more than twelve million immigrants-of nearly every nationality and race-entered the country on their way to new experiences in North America. With an astonishing array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs, Ellis Island leads the reader through the fascinating history of this small island in New York harbor from its pre-immigration days as one of the harbor's oyster islands to its spectacular years as the flagship station of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration to its current incarnation as the National Park Service's largest museum.

Across the globe, memorial and grave sites are being increasingly weaponized in conflicts and politicized by parties to advance agendas. Here, Carol S. Lilly examines ideas of death, politics, memory, ideology and nationalism in the former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, and Serbia to shine fresh light on cemetery culture in 20th-century Europe. More specifically, Death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia investigates how the Communist Party of Yugoslavia created its own communities of the dead by implementing cemetery policies which reinforced their ideals of secularism, pluralism, brotherhood, and unity. However, in doing so the communist regime left the previous system of ethno-religious segregation in place and further isolated Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims and Jews who continued to be buried in separate locations. This in turn further politicized burial rites and exacerbated tensions between different ethno-religious communities. As a result, by the time Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s, dead bodies and cemeteries had become a concerted weapon of war in the ongoing ethnic conflict. Ultimately, then, this timely study reveals for the first time the extent to which the communist regime not only failed to created their own communities of the dead but also further divided and alienated living communities in Yugoslavia.

Microclimate for Cultural Heritage: Measurement, Risk Assessment, Conservation, Restoration, and Maintenance of Indoor and Outdoor Monuments, Third Edition, presents the latest on microclimates, environmental issues and the conservation of cultural heritage. It is a useful treatise on microphysics, acting as a practical handbook for conservators and specialists in physics, chemistry, architecture, engineering, geology and biology who focus on environmental issues and the conservation of works of art. It fills a gap between the application of atmospheric sciences, like the thermodynamic processes of clouds and dynamics of planetary boundary layer, and their application to a monument surface or a room within a museum. Sections covers applied theory, environmental issues and conservation, practical utilization, along with suggestions, examples, common issues and errors.

The role of cultural memory in American identity Terrorism in American Memory argues that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and all that followed in its wake were the primary force shaping United States politics and culture in the post-9/11 era. Marita Sturken maintains that during the past two decades, when the country was subjected to terrorist attacks and promulgated ongoing wars of aggression, we have veered into increasingly polarized factions and been extraordinarily preoccupied with memorialization and the politics of memory. The post-9/11 era began with a hunger for memorialization and it ended with massive protests over police brutality that demanded the destruction of historical monuments honoring racist historical figures. Sturken argues that memory is both the battleground and the site for negotiations of national identity because it is a field through which the past is experienced in the present. The paradox of these last two decades is that it gave rise to an era of intensely nationalistic politics in response to global terrorism at the same time that it released the containment of the ghosts of terrorism embedded within US history. And within that disruption, new stories emerged, new memories were unearthed, and the story of the nation is being rewritten. For these reasons, this book argues that the post-9/11 era has come to an end, and we are now in a new still undefined era with new priorities and national demands. An era preoccupied with memory thus begins with the memorial projects of 9/11 and ends with the radical intervention of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the Lynching Memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama, a project that, unlike the nationalistic 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York, dramatically rewrites the national script of American history. Woven within analyses of memorialization, memorials, memory museums, art projects on memory, and architectural projects is a discussion about design and architecture, the increased creation of memorials as experiences, and the role of architecture as national symbolism and renewal. Terrorism in American Memory sheds light on the struggles over who is memorialized, who is forgotten, and what that politics of memory reveals about the United States as an imaginary and a nation.