Shaping Public Memory

Abstract

When we consider the knowledge we possess about the American past, we usually credit the development of the profession, principally in the context of the academy. However, in her engaging and richly detailed study, Julie Des Jardins has examined the production of knowledge much more broadly. The historical that has shaped our understandings of our past extends far beyond the university history department. Women academics appear here in force, but the enterprise Des Jardins excavates included a large cast engaged in an array of activities including collection and archival projects, local histories, and commemorations. Cast this way, women historians emerge as prolific and influential shapers of public memory in the United States. The numerous subcultures she identifies range from African American women concerned with uplift to DAR members worried about authentic Americans to feminists trying to create a single version of the suffrage fight. The most poignant passages relate to the politics of exclusion, but Des Jardins does not write a victimology. Instead, she has created a rich, flowing, and detailed narrative that reframes our understanding of the creation of knowledge in the United States. And that is not all. Des Jardins argues that historians need to make still another adjustment in thinking about their collective past: the multicultural and social history approaches that are commonplace today originated with women innovators not normally included in our historiographies. This is not completely new ground, and Des Jardins draws on other fine scholarship, including recent biographies of women historians. She also expresses her debt to Bonnie Smith's superb study, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (1998). Yet Des Jardins's subject and approach are different from Smith's. The subject is twentieth-century U. S. history, whereas Smith included the United States and Europe. Smith's theoretical analysis probed how thinking and practice have been gendered. She pioneered in demonstrating how professionalization depended upon