Michael Kammen's Commemoration of the Americanist Tradition

Abstract

' The basic question that this book asks is when and how did the United States become a land of the past, a culture with a discernible memory (or with a configuration of recognised pasts) ?' (7: Italics in original). This is the kind of formidable question that Americanists once relished in the post-war years when scholars spoke confidently about national character and the myths and symbols that defined a definite American culture. As Michael Kammen's phrasing indicates, however, his willingness to address such large issues is tempered by the knowledge that no contemporary scholar would argue that there has ever been a single American mind, character, or tradition. He anticipates that he will find a changing configuration of recognised and contending pasts, and he assumes that his treatment of the after-life of past events will be elaborately reticulated. Kammen's interest in this after-life is longstanding. The publication of Mystic Chords of Memory concludes a project that began with the publication of A Season of Youth and continued with A Machine That Would Go of Itself1 For a colonial historian, the bicentenniaries of both the American Revolution and the Constitution were a ready invitation to contemplate how the founding event and text, respectively, of the United States have been reconstructed in the nation's cultural imagination. Centennial and sesquicentennial celebrations figured largely in both volumes. In his acknowledgements in Mystic Chords of Memory (706), Kammen notes that half of the present volume was written in 1988-89, a time of international commemoration of the French Revolution and of debate in Great