American Historical Memory Research Articles

White American Historical Memory and Support for Native Appropriation

White American Historical Memory and Support for Native Appropriation

Historical Memory in the Context of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Case of the Presidency of Joseph Biden

Modern day politicians often refer to historical memory in order to construct and/or adjust foreign policy. The analysis of historical memory as one of the tools for constructing foreign policy narratives is attracting increasing scientific interest in the study of international relations. Under conditions of deep socio-political split in the USA and fragmentation of American identity, representatives of the Democratic administration actively turn to historical memory, trying to explain the changing international realities and justify the implemented foreign policy course. The article attempts to identify the key historical narratives of the Biden Administration and analyze how their use influences the foreign policy of the U.S. at the present stage. To achieve this goal, the authors used the method of narrative interpretation to conduct a qualitative analysis of a broad source base (speeches, interviews, press conferences of key representatives of the U.S. executive branch). As a result, a number of foreign policy narratives with the most characteristic historical subjects for the current administration were identified. It has been established that U.S. leaders address historical memory as part of discourses on the promotion of liberal democracy in the world; the limits of “hard power” and the fight against international terrorism; human rights and freedoms; relations with Russia; and the defense of a liberal world order. It is determined that historical narratives are often used by the United States to legitimize its unilateral and discriminatory foreign policy actions. The authors conclude that for the current administration the construction of foreign policy narratives through selective reference to the subjects of American historical memory becomes one of the key tools of adaptation to the development of international multipolarity, mobilization of its resources and consolidation of allies to defend the “free world” from “illiberal” opponents.

On Pendulum Effects in American Historical Memory

American history has often witnessed a “Pendulum Effect” in consideration of the nation’s own past. That is, attitudes swing from one interpretive pole to the opposite, in this case for interpretations of the Plymouth Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and “the first Thanksgiving.” The articles in this special issue try to avoid those extremes, but while still treating fairly and with sharp moral scruples, the events of four centuries ago and their contemporary legacies.

Kompiuteriniai žaidimai ir istorinės atminties politika: karo atmintis JAV ir Rusijos žaidimuose

[only abstract in English; full article and abstract in Lithuanian]
 The video game industry has been growing rapidly in the recent years, reaching almost 2 billion players worldwide and sometimes even exceeding profits and other numbers put up by such entertainment juggernauts as the Hollywood. It is safe to say that video-games have become an integral part of contemporary popculture, contributing to the formation of attitudes, especially among younger audiences (18–35 years old). This is especially poignant in the case of historical games, which have always been popular and have been representing one or another version of historical narration for years.
 Nevertheless, despite the immense popularity of videogames and their growing presence within contemporary culture, historians, political and social scientists have been often neglecting video game studies primarily because of its infancy and inadequacy to provide space for political reflection and argumentation. According to the skeptics, video games can only reflect the current tendencies within the order of neoliberalism prevailing in the world. However, the article contradicts this by proposing to treat this situation as an opportunity instead of an excuse – the fact that video games can reflect the injustices of today’s world without providing criticism should act as a catalyst for further studies of political argumentation within the medium of video games, which in turn would contribute to further theorizations on the critical potential of video games in connection to politics. This is deemed especially important in the case of reconstructing historical narratives in the most popular video games, the majority of which focus on various historical instances of war. As a result, the first part of the article presents an analysis on both the potential and limitations of videogames to act as spaces for the commemoration of historical memory. The second part aims to ground the theoretical implications by considering to examples of video game industries – the United States and Russia – and techniques as well as directions that they employ in reconstructing the popular prosthetic memory related to wars in which these countries had participated.
 The article concludes with the idea that historical games can indeed act as a space for producing specific historical narratives oriented toward the popular memory. When it comes to American games, they mostly focus on presenting more personal stories regarding the heroic and virtuous American soldiers during a given War. This, supplemented by a diminished or exaggerated account of actions taken by other allies (as well as enemies) aims at whitewashing the American historical memory. Among the Russian games, however, personal identification through emotional storybuilding is much less pronounced. Its place is taken by focusing on the technological domination and de-personalized stories of bravery employed by the Russians and Soviets.
 To conclude, the article once again calls for more engagement with the medium of videogames from the side of social and political science as well as history. Video games have quickly become one of the main venues for younger demographic groups to get their first pieces of knowledge regarding history, politics, gender and other topics. The importance of this is understood not only by American but by Russian officials as well, which demands more research on the power of games and their critical potential. This engagement would allow for less political manipulation (especially in the case of historical games) and for a better understanding and fulfillment of the potential of video games.

"I Shall Never Forget": The Civil War in American Historical Memory, 1863-1915

"I Shall Never Forget": The Civil War in American Historical Memory, 1863-1915

West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands. Culture America Series. By Emily Lutenski

West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands . Culture America Series. By Emily Lutenski. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. xii + 332 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $37.50.) In West of Harlem , Emily Lutenski argues that although “African American presence” is often “forgotten in the American historical memory,” African American literature and the American West have always been mutually constitutive cultural, material, and symbolic sites (p. 7). Opening with a productive juxtaposition of two speeches delivered within a month of one another at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Frederick Douglass’s speech on the fair’s “Colored American Day”—Lutenski works in the conceptual space opened between the two, identifying the damaging effects wrought by the … jneary{at}hunter.cuny.edu

Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops

When Abraham Lincoln issued his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he not only freed the slaves in the Confederate states but also invited freed slaves and free persons of colour to join the U.S. Army as part of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), the first systematic, large-scale effort by the U.S. government to arm African Americans to aid in the nation's defense. By the end of the war in 1865, nearly 180,000 black soldiers had fought for the Union. Lincoln's role in the arming of African Americans remains a central but unfortunately obscure part of one of the most compelling periods in American history. In Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops John David Smith offers a concise, enlightening exploration of the development of Lincoln's military emancipation project, its implementation, and the recruitment and deployment of black troops. Though scholars have written much on emancipation and the USCT, Smith's work frames the evolution of Lincoln's ideas on emancipation and arming blacks within congressional actions, explaining how, when, and why the president seemed to be so halting in his progression to military emancipation. After tracing Lincoln's evolution from opposing to supporting emancipation as a necessary war measure and to championing the recruitment of black troops for the Union Army, Smith details the creation, mobilization, and diverse military service of the USCT. He assesses the hardships under which the men of the USCT served, including the multiple forms of discrimination from so-called friends and foes alike, and examines the broad meaning of Lincoln's military emancipation project and its place in African American historical memory.

Abraham Lincoln: Gradual Emancipator

In American historical memory, Abraham Lincoln has become a character of nearly mythical proportions, sometimes even referred to as 'The Great Emancipator'. This characterization depicts Lincoln as having sought the abolition of slavery from the outset of his political career. However, this paper shall examine the speeches, letters, and actions of Lincoln, arguing that he was in fact a 'Gradual Emancipator', cautiously seeking only the phased abolition of slavery.

Excavating the Past: Rememories and Healing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

This essay discusses the possibility of the combination of the social with the aesthetic functions of African American literature. It analyses how the main characters of Morrison’s Beloved are portrayed not just as individual and fictional types, but also as collective and historical ones, through which African American historical memory and culture are revealed in slavery time.

From "Salt of the Earth" to "Poison and Curse"? The Jay and Adams Families and the Construction of American Historical Memory

From "Salt of the Earth" to "Poison and Curse"? The Jay and Adams Families and the Construction of American Historical Memory

Meta Warrick's 1907 "Negro Tableaux" and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory

For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our “Teaching the JAH” Web project at <http://www.indiana.edu/∼jah/teaching>. For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our “Teaching the JAH” Web project at <http://www.indiana.edu/∼jah/teaching>. Confronting visitors who meandered through the Negro Building at the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, held in Norfolk, Virginia, was a tableau entitled Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown. Meta Warrick (Fuller), a sculptor, had created and arranged twenty-four two-foot-high plaster figures that re-imagined the shackled, nearly nude, and traumatized Africans who had landed in Jamestown in 1619. In Landing and thirteen other dioramas, she used more than 130 painted plaster figures, model landscapes, and backgrounds to give viewers a chronological survey of the African American experience. Scenes ranged from a tableau of a fugitive slave to a depiction of the home life of “the modern, successfully educated, and progressive Negro.”1 Drawing upon but moving beyond her classical training in Philadelphia and Paris, Warrick applied new capacities for simulation and illusion to the depiction of African American themes. By doing so, she expanded the repertoire of representation of the African American past. Incorporating the lives and concerns of African Americans into the saga of civilization, she turned the historical African American into the centerpiece of the saga, claiming a position the dominant white narrative denied. Her dioramas, which suggested the expansiveness of black abilities, aspirations, and experiences, presented a cogent alternative to white representations of history—by an African American.

"A Material Collapse That Is Construction": History and Counter-Memory in Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca

From the Loop, where sunlight off the lakefront strikes the shining towers, State Street runs straight south, wide, busy with streetcars and heavy trucks. Quickly the buildings get shabby--little stores selling auto parts, junkyard crammed with rusting wreckage. city is harsh: concrete streets, brick building walls, black steel viaducts. Beyond 22nd Street the faces of the people are black. This is the South Side Negro section. Here the street is quieter, the sun is hazy and dirty and pale ... --John Bartlow Martin, The Strangest Place in Chicago So begins 1950 journey in Harper's magazine to one of the most remarkable Negro slum exhibits in the world (87), the Building on Chicago's South Side. This journey from shining towers to shabby tenements, where even the sun is dirty, follows what was becoming familiar rhetorical path for describing deteriorating urban neighborhoods, the racialized discourse of urban decline. Perhaps no other building symbolized post-World War II urban decline more starkly than the Building. Built by the D.H. Burnham Company in 1891, the was at first celebrated as boldly innovative architectural prototype for luxury apartment living. With its atrium courtyards, its skylights and ornamental iron grillwork, its elaborate fountains and flower gardens, the was major tourist attraction during the Columbian Exposition. Beginning with the movement of Chicago's wealthy to the North Side at the turn of the century, however, and culminating with the economic devastation wrought by the Great Depression, the gradually became an overcrowded tenement. By 1950, the Building had become notorious not because of its architectural magnificence, but because of the poverty of its remaining inhabitants.(1) It was demolished in 1952 so that its final owner, the Illinois Institute of Technology (I.I.T.), could expand its new campus, designed by the renowned Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Before the Building was obliterated, it had become the subject of national media attention as monumental example of urban decline, an example depicted in racialized rhetoric that foreshadows the discourse of urban decline in the 1960s. It also became the subject of an important collection of poems that begins with an epigraph from Martin's The Strangest Place in Chicago, but contests the dominant discourse of urban decline, Gwendolyn Brooks's the Mecca. title poem of this collection reconstructs the vanished city of the in dialogical narrative of counter-memory that questions official historical accounts of the building. Rather than presenting presumably disinterested statistical report on urban poverty, Brooks was interested in writing about the with a certain detachment, but only as means of reaching substance with some incisiveness. She aimed in her long poem to present large variety of personalities against mosaic of daily affairs, recognizing that even the grimmest of these is likely to have streak or two streaks of sun.(2) Brooks's representation of the resembles neither the utopian space its designers had envisioned nor the dystopian place its commemorators disparaged. Instead, In the Mecca interrogates the dystopian discourse of urban decline so often invoked to characterize postwar African American life; as such, it is an incisive intervention into the construction of African American historical memory. Robert Beauregard documents in Voices of Decline: Postwar Fate of US Cities how the 1950s discourse of urban decline was becoming more racialized. postwar years saw an increased migration of rural blacks to northern cities. continued to be mecca for Southern blacks, but, as in other urban centers, the lack of housing and jobs for unskilled workers resulted in greater crowding in inner-city neighborhoods.(3) demolition of deteriorating buildings and neighborhoods for redevelopment projects did not result in adequate new housing for the urban poor; slums instead grew larger and more concentrated with the absorption of people displaced by demolition, while dehumanizing large public housing projects themselves became slums. …

Shane (Novel and Film) at Century's End

Six years ago, I conducted a lecture-discussion on Jack Schaefer's novel Shane for the public library in Durham, North Carolina. The audience was made up of middle-aged and/or retired people. They liked the book, and we had a lively evening's interchange. Recalling that evening as I made plans for a course in the American novel, I decided that I would sneak Shane on the syllabus. It was 1993, the centennial year of Frederick Jackson Turner's pronouncement on the significance of the frontier in American history, and I thought it appropriate to emphasize frontier experience in literature. Shane would help me do that. It would also serve as a counterpoint to Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth-so very New York and civilized and (as several students complained later) so very long. I'd give the class a quick read, one with a plot marked by classic economy.1 There were other reasons for my semester plan. Like many Americans, I was giving much thought to the violence prevalent in our society. Emblematic of the issue was the beating of Rodney King by policemen in Los Angeles, imprinted on the nation's mind by the numerous replays of an amateur video on the television screen. Then came the first trial of the officers and the acquittal by jury (no blacks) from middle-class Sima Valley and the ensuing riots and deaths in L.A. Truck driver Reginald Denny narrowly escaped with his life; the nation watched numerous replays of the vicious assault on him. Other instances of violence were abundant in the newspapers and nightly news programs. Children frequently were victims of random gun fire. So numerous were shootings everywhere that it seemed likely that the National Rifle Association might no longer have the last word on legislation to control unregulated purchases of guns. Responding to public pressure, politicians everywhere were making crime a major theme. But, as David Zucchino has observed, the American historical memory is short: Violence has plagued our republic throughout its history. By many measures, this decade has not been the most violent in American history.2 But in the centennial Turner year, course attention to a violent history and justice was definitely in order. I wanted to do more than give the chronological sweep that plays off romance and novel, novel of manners and naturalism; I taught the traditional major figures in the course, but even those I handled somewhat differently. Instead of Moby Dick, I chose Benito Cereno and Billy Budd. For Mark Twain, I chose Pudd'n Head Wilson; for Faulkner, I took The Unvanquished, frontier as well as Southern. My endpoint was Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident. Schaefer's Shane would lead up to Clark's powerful account of frontier violence and thwarted justice. Because memorable films had been made of both Western novels, I arranged for screenings. Like many other Western novels and films, they foreground violence and gunplay. Could those classic Western texts help us better understand contemporary America? It was appropriate to include Shane for historical reasons, as well. Jack Schaefer had died on January 24, 1991, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at age 85. Tribute seemed in order-especially since so little note had been taken of the writer's death. The Western Literature Association's journal, Western American Literature, which usually has memorial tributes for winners of the Association's Distinguished Achievement Award, carried no memorial tribute to Schaefer, who had received the award in 1975. The course was populated by juniors and seniors, including many majors-bright people who certainly had some sense of multi-culturalism, cultural criticism, and challenged canons. I thought of those dimensions as I watched the Shane video with the class and in our discussions about it and the novel. The culture that produced those and the culture of my class sometimes seemed very remote from each other. I was about the age of my students when I first viewed Shane in the 1950s. …

The Making of American Memory

HOWEVER ANXIOUS WERE THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE SECOND WORLD War, they were also the age of Pax Americana and the liberal consensus, and Americans' understanding of past, present, and future exuded confidence and optimism. As Frances Fitzgerald observed in the early 1970s: national myth is that of creativity and progress, of a steady climbing upward into power and prosperity, both for the individual and the country as a whole. Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind.' The schooling we received in the 1950s and 1960s reflected just such a vision of America. In contrast to the postwar period, American historical memory, consciousness, and imagination have been subject to a pretty rough ride these past twenty years. In the wake of the struggles and shocks of the 1960sfollowed by Vietnam, Watergate, and economic recession-the years since 1974 have been marked by anxiety and pessimism. By all accounts, we