| Summary: | The writer considers the ongoing discussion on the best way to package and present American national history, at monuments, in museums, and through popular culture. She notes that the debate has become bogged down in a morass of politically charged epithets such as “political correctness,” “multiculturalism,” and “revisionism.” She points out that in the past, monuments were the most recognizable means of promoting reconciliation, fostering unity in the community, or celebrating a particularly cherished civic virtue, but she asserts that they can have the opposite effect when they are removed from their original context. She presents her arguments with reference to a number of written works on monuments and memory, including Shimon Attie's Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects; Albert Boime's The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea For Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalistic Era; Jane Kramer's Whose Art Is It?; Sanford Levinson's Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies; and Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.
|
|---|