Washington and Lincoln: American Icons in a Modern and Post-Modern Age

Abstract

The works of historian Seth C. Bruggeman and sociologist Barry Schwartz examine how Americans have commemorated and remembered two pivotal figures in the nation's history George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In Here, George Washington Was Born, Seth Bruggeman takes a case-study approach and traces efforts by individuals, a private organization, and eventually the National Park Service to preserve the birthplace of the nation's first president. Barry Schwartz has a broader agenda in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Age, one that builds upon his earlier scholarship in memory studies. His work not only seeks to trace the changing patterns of memory about Lincoln, but also uses them to interpret what these shifts indicate about the nature of American society. Seth Bruggeman contributes to a growing body of literature that seeks to understand the place of George Washington in national memory. Even before memory studies came into vogue, scholars have noted the crucial role of Washington as a national symbol. In his classic study, Washington: Man and Monument (1958), Marcus Cunliffe describes the adulation Americans bestowed on the nation's first president as reflected in the Washington Monument in the District of Columbia.1 Karal Ann Marling in George Washington Slept Here (1988), traced the varied efforts to commemorate Washington in art, literature, public monuments, historical reenactments, and the preservation of historic sites associated with him.2 Although Americans in the antebellum era made few efforts to preserve historic sites, a number of homes associated with Washington's life and career as a general were preserved. One of the nation's first