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.
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