Building Upon Supressed memory

Society Hill was once a rioting example of urban blight. Now it is a desirable neighborhood serving as backdrop to INHP. Without preservation efforts, this would not be true. Answering Stapp and Turino’s question, we need more efforts like these even if the scholarship is not as enticing as the façade itself. Ouroussoff’s distortion concern is valid when considering architectural history, but how many remember how it was supposed to be much less how to actually recreate buildings that represent artisan skills of builders long descended to dust?

Memory is of paramount concern to preservers as well as those correctly seeking to complete an entire historical picture that has been erased. The Lowell Experiment demonstrates recent memory and experience can be conveniently erased as memories of dividing conflicts challenge our notions of what nation should be but probably never was. Memory is subject to change and distortion the authors in Slavery in Public History agree. Thus as one of the essays concluded, sites should be forums and not cradles of one dimensional thinking.

Collectively, the essays in Slavery in Public History and The Lowell Experiment show that historians and the public have struggled to come to terms with globalization, present as past, because of American Exceptionalism. Americans refuse to accept that it is a passenger in the new world economy and fail to remember our British, French, Spanish, and African forefathers traded in globalized Atlantic market made possible by African slaves. Americans don’t predate this; we grew from it. Realizing that Americans are not as exceptional as our mores suggest is central to understanding our most lingering national conflict – slavery in the land of the free. Only then, can we study slavery in a global context helping to free some of the national guilt. Exceptionalism forges amnesia, then, now, and in the foreseeable future.

On Public Memory in Time and Place

Charlene Myers and David Glassberg are in agreement when they approach their work with the understanding that popular memory has evolved into a series of sometimes conflicting beliefs that inform a community about its place in the broader world and the individual’s place within that community. This must be the result of a more educated public that no longer trusts what had been passed down from medieval power consolidators determined to impose a singular vision. Glassberg invokes Ernest Gellner, a scholarly pioneer studying what defines and confines a nation. Glassberg emphasizes these beliefs and the study of place while engaging public history and popular memory.

Myers’ Independence Hall employs this method to retell the history of a place while accounting for the community’s that was inspired by, developed around, and worked to evolve the place. But there are gambits here including the risk of making the place primary over human agency. Indeed, Myers often almost makes the building a living breathing thing by overstating the ability of an enshrined object to inspire. It can, but it is far from being a witness and further still an actor

The conflicting component of shared memory is crucial. Although Myers places equal importance on remembering and forgetting, this does not gel with modern nationalistic scholarship which identifies conflict as critical to community formation, not sacrificed for national cohesiveness. As Erika Doss indicates, during national crisis, victory, and political conflict, people are more desperate for memory and tradition. In her Memorial Mania, national conflict has played a critical role in America’s obsession for monuments. So as Susan Crane implies in her thesis, conflict is inevitable in public institutions, and as such, collective memory represents ideological evolution.