Commemoration lies at the poetic, historiographic, and social
heart of human community. It is how societies define themselves and
is central to the institution of the city. Addressing the complex
ways that monuments in the United States have been imagined,
created, and perceived from the colonial period to the present,
"Commemoration in America" is a wide-ranging volume that focuses on
the role of remembrance and memorialization in American urban life.
The volume's contributors are drawn from a spectrum of
disciplines--social and urban history, urban planning,
architecture, art history, preservation, and architectural
history--and take a broad view of commemoration. In addition to the
making of traditional monuments, the essays explore such
commemorative acts as building preservation, biography,
portraiture, ritual performance, street naming, and the planting of
trees.
Providing an overview of American memorialization and the
impulses behind it, "Commemoration in America" emphasizes a
universal tendency for individuals and groups to use monuments to
define their contemporary social identity and to construct
historical narratives. The volume shows that while commemorative
acts and objects affect the community in fundamental ways, their
meaning is always multivalent and conflicted, attesting to both
triumphs and tragedies. Constituting a vital part of both
individual and national identity, commemoration's contradictions
strike at the core of American identity and speak to the importance
of remembrance in the construction of our diverse national cultural
landscape.
Contributors: Jhennifer A. Amundson, Judson University *
Catherine W. Bishir, North Carolina State University Libraries *
Thomas J. Campanella, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *
Glenn T. Eskew, Georgia State University * Glenn Forley, Parsons /
The New School for Design * Sally Greene, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill * Alison K. Hoagland, Michigan
Technological University * Lynne Horiuchi, University of
California, Berkeley * Ellen M. Litwicki, SUNY Fredonia * David
Lowenthal, University College London * Mark A. Peterson, University
of California, Berkeley * Richard M. Sommer, University of Toronto
* Dell Upton, University of California, Los Angeles
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