-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Keith Beutler, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 334–335, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae101
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Matthew Dennis's American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory is a well-written survey offered not “with a sense of omniscience or superiority but in a spirit of inquiry, fascination, respect, occasionally pensive concern, and sometimes delight at human whimsy and weirdness” (p. xix). Its eight fast-moving, evocative chapters are presented in three loosely periodizing parts.
Part 1, “Foundations,” probes how Americans in the early republic used historical relics, including those of natural history, such as the mastodon skeleton unearthed and displayed by Charles Willson Peale, to give the new nation a venerable, ancient back story. Part 2, “Supremacy,” argues that, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, racist themes of whites' “Manifest Destiny” were reified through relics used to underwrite expropriation of Native-held lands. In “Supremacy,” Dennis also considers with nuance the familiar “bloody shirt” trope in antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction era politics, and leaves off with a moving, sensitive chapter on the cultural valences of “atrocious relics” of lynchings of Black people in the era of Jim Crow and beyond, tokens taken by white mobs to magnify, reproduce, and perversely sacralize their acts of racist terrorism (p. 165). Part 3, “Heroes and Victims,” ably extends the chronological reach of American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Provocatively, yet carefully, the book explicates material remembrances of the Oklahoma City bombing and of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks while daring to respectfully ask hard questions, such as: Are all victims of attacks truly honored historically by being reflexively memorialized as heroes?
