Making American Memory Great Again

DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji H. Ozawa.

Memories of the Japanese American Incarceration Camps during WWII vary widely across America. For some, memories of the incarceration are a focal point of their identity and a driver of political action. Others who underwent this imprisonment chose not to recall their experiences. The incarceration can haunt their descendants as an ever-present but silenced past. Broadly, the United States’ relationship to this past is fractured. Activists invoke the incarceration as an affront to American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Hayes.

When we remember the great American values of freedom and opportunity, do we also remember the cost, and those at whose expense those values are gained?  The historic site of Fort Snelling in Minnesota has been reconstructed and interpreted as a frontier fort, opening the west to settlers.  Yet the site also has witnessed the failed promises to Native peoples, the ambivalent status of enslaved African Americans in non-slavery territories, and the struggles to belong by Japanese American soldiers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Shackel.

In the late nineteenth century immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe came to the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Many of the newcomers were underpaid, underfed, and lived in substandard housing. The coal industry thrived until the end of WWI and it is virtually non-existent today. The region’s memory of the coal industry focuses on the hard work and sacrifice of the newcomers, and how they survived and made a successful life for themselves and for their offspring....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Montgomery.

During the nineteenth century, the United States had an "Indian Problem".  The problem was that Indians continued to exist despite rigorous efforts to erase them from the landscape through disease, violence, and segregation. To solve this conundrum, the U.S. government staffed and funded the Indian School System; a system comprised of residential and non-residential schools in which savage Indians were transformed into obedient citizens. Over the past several decades, archaeologists and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antoinette Jackson.

This discussion exams the cultural construction of heritage in terms of leisure, travel, and tourism with respect to race at U.S. National Park sites in the Southeast region. I argue for a more critical analysis of the centrality of race in discussions of stewardship of heritage resources.  Risks and restrictions to freedom of movement and access to public sites of leisure were real for those identified as non-white in America prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a much talked about speech...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uzi Baram.

Archaeological excavations and presentations are memory-work, offering tactile and visual materials for consideration of the past. In a coastal Florida city, growing rapidly through in-migration of retirees and service industry employment opportunities, there are few aware or concerned over history. Yet the past haunts the Florida Gulf Coast and the expanding interest in heritage includes competitions among historians and archaeologists, residents and tourists, and development interests and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tsim D Schneider.

Conventional archaeological and historical accounts of Spanish missions, Russian and Mexican mercantile enterprises, and American settler colonialism in California have overemphasized the loss experienced by indigenous Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo communities who encountered these diverse colonial programs. The story of loss found in many accounts contrasts sharply with the casino – a symbol of tribal prosperity – established by the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo community in 2013. Each...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara J. Little.

Just days before I wrote this abstract, the city of New Orleans finished removing four monuments to the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, inspiring other cities to consider the same. This example of people taking control of the narrative inscribed in their own landscape serves as backdrop to this session in which we reflect on the changing nature of place-based historical memory. I consider the changing nature of America and what it means to be a society that appears to be moving away from a...