Interpreting Sacred Ground is a rhetorical analysis of Civil War
battlefields and parks, and the ways various commemorative
traditions-and their ideologies of race, reconciliation,
emancipation, and masculinity-compete for dominance. The National
Park Service (NPS) is known for its role in the preservation of
public sites deemed to have historic, cultural, and natural
significance. In Interpreting Sacred Ground, J. Christian
Spielvogel studies the NPS's secondary role as an interpreter or
creator of meaning at such sites, specifically Gettysburg National
Military Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and Cold
Harbor Visitor Center. Spielvogel studies in detail the museums,
films, publications, tours, signage, and other media at these
sites, and he studies and analyzes how they shape the meanings that
visitors are invited to construct. Though the NPS began developing
interpretive exhibits in the 1990s that highlighted slavery and
emancipation as central facets to understanding the war, Spielvogel
argues that the NPS in some instances preserves outmoded narratives
of white reconciliation and heroic masculinity, obscuring the
race-related causes and consequences of the war as well as the
war's savagery. The challenges the NPS faces in addressing these
issues are many, from avoiding unbalanced criticism of either the
Union or the Confederacy, to foregrounding race and violence as
central issues, preserving clear and accurate renderingsof
battlefield movements and strategies, and contending with the
various public constituencies with their own interpretive stakes in
the battle for public memory. Spielvogel concludes by arguing for
the National Park Service's crucial role as a critical voice in
shaping twentieth-first-century Civil War public memory and
highlights the issues the agency faces as it strives to maintain
historical integrity while contending with antiquated renderings of
the past.
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