Reviewed by: Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival by Joy M. Giguere Andrew Wasserman Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival By Joy M. Giguere. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2014, 274 pages, $74.95 Cloth. In January 2011, Zahi Hawass, then secretary general for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, authored a letter to the mayor of New York City and the president of the Central Park Conservancy challenging New York City’s and the United States’ concern for their monuments. His letter focused on Cleopatra’s Needle, the seventy-one-foot high granite obelisk commemorating King Thutmose III, which the Egyptian government proposed gifting to the United States in 1869, and which was installed in Central Park in 1881. Hawass claimed that negligence in conservation [End Page 238] compromised the monument’s condition, drawing particular attention to the surface erosion of carved hieroglyphic text. He proposed that repatriation of the obelisk should be pursued. Jonathan Kuhn, director of Art and Antiquities for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, delivered a speedy response. He rejected claims of negligence, asserting the multi-year collaboration between the Central Park Conservancy and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to assess the monument’s condition. This culminated three years later in a full restoration of the monument. In May 2014, the Central Park Conservancy performed a laser cleaning and granite adhesive stabilization, and assured the public of the monument’s continued presence in the park for the next several hundred years. Hawass’ claim to the obelisk, falling under his purview as an “Egyptian” monument regardless of its legal ownership or location, served as an affront to local and national notions of patrimony. This question of how monuments transcend nations of origin and are adopted as part of the value system of another nation is taken up by Joy M. Giguere in her recent study Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival. Rather than focusing on large-scale imported Egyptian objects, Giguere examines the importation, transformation, and application of an Egyptian archeological visual vocabulary. Surveying the period from the 1790s through the 1930s, set alongside the evolution of national anxieties from the American Revolution to the Great Depression, Giguere presents Egyptian revivalism as an evolving style. Along the way, she tracks the ways in which interpretations of the style shifted from calling to mind the permanence and grandeur of an ancient international culture to something more “characteristically American,” taken from the New York Times’ description of the Washington National Monument in the paper’s re-evaluation of the then-recently completed work (187). Giguere develops a history of the long nineteenth century in the United States in which the commemorative landscape records the pursuit to formalize a national identity through coded class, gender, and racial gestures. She tracks the aspirations of a professional, educated, middle and upper class, white American elite to construct a visible heritage through private commemorations and public monuments that use an antique style. Her rich cultural history adds to the literature on nineteenth-century public art and commemorative culture. The author combines visual analysis of extant [End Page 239] works with a close reading of a range of period textual records: published reviews, dedicatory orations from cornerstone laying and unveiling ceremonies, manuals of art theory and style guides, and short fiction, novels, and poetry. To this extent, Giguere’s study is as much about the imagined community of regional and national interests developed from circulating print media. Beyond the enormous scale and occasionally intricate ornament of some of the memorial works considered in her study, Giguere examines how public discourse informed reading and viewing audiences’ understandings of this historicized type as “an appropriate expression of American patriotism” (115). Giguere’s text opens with a chapter surveying the nineteenth-century “Egyptomania” that informed high-minded and populist entertainments, scientific and pseudoscientific research, and fantasy literature and political philosophy. Travelogues of awe-inspiring sights encountered along Egypt-inclusive Grand Tours and orientalist fantasies of reanimated mummies capable of disclosing secrets of pharaonic cultures fulfilled popular desires for information about a remote ancient culture. However, Giguere devotes most of...