War Memorial Research Articles

Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell

Reviewed by: Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell Stephanie K. Lawton (bio) Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era. By Sarah J. Purcell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 321. $95.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $26.99 ebook) Historians of Civil War memory have eagerly anticipated Purcell's project, and it does not disappoint. Americans in the nineteenth century took death seriously and produced an astonishing amount of material about public funerals. Purcell is up to this challenge and incorporates a remarkable number of primary sources, including over three hundred newspapers, surveying the funeral rites and memorial politics for nine prominent Americans, ranging from well-known individuals like Henry Clay, Robert E. Lee, and Frederick Douglass, to nearly forgotten people like Elmer Ellsworth, George Peabody, and Winnie Davis. Purcell states that although public funerals have long been cast as rites of "unity and consensus," they are in fact contested sites of memory creation as participants "advocate for alternative visions of the past" and project "conflicting ideas about the nation onto famous figures whom they mourned" (pp. 5–6). Through such debates about the past, "Public funerals … helped define American national identities" as post-bellum Americans worked to "'reconstitute' the … nation in ways compatible with rival political interests" (pp. 3–4). But rather than a singular memorial tradition, Purcell shows that multiple, often conflicting, strands were combined in the same commemorative events. [End Page 84] Each chapter contains real gems. Purcell's discussion of how Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" oration was a rebuttal of the eulogies for Henry Clay in July 1852 is eyeopening. The diplomatic wrangling between the British and American governments over who would transport George Peabody's remains back to the U.S. in the wake of the CSS Alabama dispute shows that the political significance of memory is often international in scope. Purcell's attention to the racial lines of division in these ceremonies is superb, but there could be more attention to the less obvious ways gender and class were used to exclude or marginalize lower-class men, immigrants, and women. For example, while white women joined crowds welcoming Henry Clay's body to their cities and female family members sometimes appeared in the processions, women did not march, deliver the eulogies, or sit on the civic committees that planned these events. Only in the South after the Civil War did ladies' memorial associations start to take a role in hosting mourning rites, but they still did not participate in all aspects of public mourning equally with men. Even lower-class white men, such as firemen in New York City, usually walked near the end of funeral processions, not in the chief places of honor, which highlights the fractures of class and whiteness that became more prominent as America entered its Gilded Age. Spectacle of Grief opens promising avenues for future exploration, especially the possibility of further integrating disability studies into Civil War memory. Throughout the book, undertakers tried to prevent corpses from decaying while on public view while eulogists praised their past physical attributes and ignored often lengthy and disabling illnesses. These attempts to hide mortality, even after death, invites collaboration with disability scholars who have argued that illness and disability have never been welcome in the American community. Scholars of Civil War memory or of death and funeral traditions will find this a valuable addition to their bibliographies. History [End Page 85] instructors who teach about any of the book's nine central subjects would benefit from this additional context, and the chapters on Henry Clay and Frederick Douglass/Winnie Davis would work well as a set to assign to upper-division history classes talking about U.S. slavery, race, gender, and politics. Stephanie K. Lawton STEPHANIE K. LAWTON is an assistant professor of history at the University of the Cumberlands. Her research focuses on Greco-Roman influences on presidential funerals in the nineteenth-century United States. Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical Society

Streamlining referral decisions for childhood poisoning: a cross-sectional study from a tertiary children's hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.

The study objectives were to report on current paediatric poisoning figures from South Africa, and to better understand this patient population to contribute suggestions for streamlining local triage and referral criteria. A retrospective review of children presenting to Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital (RCWMCH) with poisoning between January 2009 and December 2019 was performed. Data were extracted from the Poisons Information Centre's Clinical Poisonings Database. There were 3699 incidents, involving 3662 patients; 3011 (81%) patients were under 5 years (median 29 months, IQR 19 to 49 months). There was a slight decline in numbers over the 11-year period.Most patients were referred (n=2542, 69%), which included a greater proportion that were symptomatic (p < 0.001). There were 8 deaths (case fatality rate 0.2%).Medications were the most common single toxin group (n=1270, 38%), followed by handyman and industrial (HI) products (n=889, 27%), household products (n=451, 14%), and pesticides (n=445, 13%). There was a significant relationship between toxin type and referral patterns (p < 0.001) as well as clinical severity (p < 0.001): pesticides and HI products (paraffin, n=486/568, 86%) had a greater proportion of referrals, and pesticides more moderate to fatal poisonings (n=132/445, 30%), all due to cholinergic (organophosphates and carbamates) and formamidine pesticides.The medication subgroups anticonvulsants (n=21/78, 27%), anti-infectives (n=4/34, 12%), multi-vitamin/mineral (MVM) supplements (n=17/84, 20%), neuropsychiatric medications (n=50/350, 14%) and substances of abuse (n=13/47, 28%) had larger proportions of moderate to severe poisonings (p < 0.001), as did the small group of biological toxins (n=17/55, 31%; p < 0.001). Certain medication, pesticide, and biological toxin subgroups, should be flagged for early referral. The goal is to improve patient outcomes as well as optimize the use of limited resources.

Memory, counter-memory and denialism: How search engines circulate information about the Holodomor-related memory wars

Search engines, such as Google or Yandex, shape social reality by informing their users about current and historical phenomena. However, there is little research on how search engines deal with contested memories, which are subjected to ontological conflicts known as memory wars. In this article, we investigate how search engines circulate information about memory wars related to the Holodomor, a mass famine caused by Soviet repressive politics in Ukraine in 1932–1933. For this aim, we conduct an agent-based audit of four search engines—Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, and Yandex—and examine how their top search results represent the Holodomor and related memory wars. Our findings demonstrate that search engines prioritize interpretations of the Holodomor aligning with specific sides in the memory wars, thus becoming memory warriors themselves.

Mnemonic wars and parallel polis: The anti-politics of memory in Central and Southeast Europe: Kosovar women and Black/Roma Lives Matter

The essay argues that anti-politics, a category borrowed from the anti-communist movement in the Eastern Bloc, can inspire memory studies. We focus on one of the chosen categories – the parallel polis (with some forays into the matter of the nonviolence movement). We discuss this universal category through the particular lens of Central and Southeast Europe with two examples: (1) women’s memories of war and violence in Kosovo with a specific focus on the Heroinat monument in Pristina and (2) the Black Lives Matter movement in Czechia that can be used to highlight the racially and ethnically motivated activities of the police, as well as oblivion of the Holocaust of the Roma community in mainstream discourse. It all leads to the identification of parallel orders of memory produced by marginalized groups, as well as the development of anti-politics of memory in opposition to the official, state-driven politics of memory.

Memory conflicts and memory grey zones: War memory in Bosnia–Herzegovina between public memory disputes, literary narratives and personal experience

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, memories of the 1990s war remain hugely divided on political and institutional levels, constituting what we may think of as a mnemonic war. Interview-based qualitative research shows that people in Bosnia on the individual level tend to follow the dominant narrative of their own group, yet, when challenged on these viewpoints, may also admit that other narratives and different truths may exist. Indeed, this research seems to propose the existence of a memorial grey zone where more open understanding and recognition of other positions is possible. Thus, while memory politics and memory institutionalization are rigidly opposed, other types of memory mediation may challenge the ethnic divisions of the memory landscape, opening up a memorial grey zone. In this article, we study the individual reception of literary works written by Bosnian émigré writers, asking how readers interact with established yet fluid memory discourses in Bosnia. Using focus groups as an interviewing method, we explore how the texts are perceived and discussed by lay readers in the two political entities, the Bosniak–Croat Federation and Republika Srpska. We are particularly interested in how readers make sense of the memory accounts in the texts, and how this relates to personal experiences and official memory narratives within each of the two entities. We argue that the reading and discussions of literary war memories allow for complex negotiations between personal and official ‘group’ narratives, opening a memorial grey zone that transcends the sharp divisions dominating memory politics in Bosnia and creates space for alternative memory positions.

New constellations of mnemonic wars: An introduction

This special issue titled Mnemonic Wars: New Constellations has two objectives. First, it maps some of the current memory conflicts in different parts of the world, focusing on their topics and novel political, cultural and social constellations. Second, the issue problematizes how the different currents of revitalized national politics and globalization processes influence and sometimes even trigger memory wars. Who are the contemporary memory agents fostering confrontational memory politics? What tools, media and practices do they use to promote their interpretations of the past? How are these memory wars being played out internationally? In what ways do global developments, such as the spread of social media, the emergence of transnational memory politics or the establishment of transnational networks of memory activists, influence today’s memory conflicts? Finally, how do these discursive struggles translate into real-life conflicts? In their introductory article, the guest editors discern between the older and more recent approaches to research on memory conflicts and set the conceptual agenda for the entire issue.

Memory wars in postimperial settings: The challenges of transnationalism and the risks of new totalizing mnemonics

Memory wars in postimperial settings: The challenges of transnationalism and the risks of new totalizing mnemonics

‘The primitive accumulation of capital and memory’: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia

The article elaborates on Marx’s concept of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital by extending it to the field of memory and introducing a new concept of the ‘primitive accumulation of memory’. The article argues that this concept gives us an innovative path to understand the relationship between memory and capital. To arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the break-up of Yugoslavia and its thoroughly revised memoryscape, this text combines a politicoeconomic analysis with the evaluation of memory-related ideological shifts that are in fact perceived as long-term mnemonic wars in (post-)Yugoslavia. The article analyses how nationalism and memory revisionism are internally linked to capitalist accumulation. More specifically, the article will observe how an ethnocentric mnemonic war sought to openly negate the socialist and anti-fascist past. Indeed, the creation of an anti-communist, and at times anti-antifascist, orientation was integral to the imagining of new nation-states. Juxtaposed to this creative and generative current of memory revisionism, the primitive accumulation of capital in post-Yugoslavia began with the ‘deaccumulation’ of social infrastructure and wealth, and with the dispossession of working people. The bigger the dispossession, the larger the nationalist accumulation of memory and displacement of class antagonism. Finally, the article discusses what at first glance seems to be a pacifying discourse of ‘national reconciliation’, which stoked a thorough revision of the public memory of World War II. This revision reconciled fascist collaborationists and anti-fascist Partisans, and it helped to challenge Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist consensus, while also framing the ethnic wars of the 1990s.

Notes towards a historical, critical theory of memory constellations: Postcolonial nationalist memory in Michael Anthony’s King of the Masquerade

The historical and critical theory of memory constellations addresses two challenges in cultural memory studies: the detachment of memories from socio-historical contexts and the risk of critical concepts becoming dogmatic. Instead of imposing a memory concept top-down, memory constellations analyse cultural memories from the bottom-up by triangulating these with their historical precedents and the social conditions that enable the memories to emerge. The tensions, conflicts and contradictions between memory, genealogy and social conditions enable a fundamentally historical critique. The description of the steelpan in Michael Anthony’s novella King of the Masquerade and wider societal as well as transnational dynamics reveals a memory war that can be described as a memory constellation of postcolonial nationalist remembrance.

Memory laws, mnemonic weapons: The diffusion of a norm across Europe and beyond

The diffusion of memory laws across Europe maps onto global trends towards legal memory protection writ large. Through applications of cosmopolitan memory and norm diffusion, this article demonstrates that differences across laws – although they derive language and sentiment from a shared global norm – also adhere to the specific memory politics of the state. The author proposes that three categories of memory law have emerged since the 1980s, each resulting from isomorphic pressures exerted by an international community with expectations of shared sociolegal human rights norms. The article concludes with a case study of recent laws in Russia (2014) and Poland (2018): both illustrative of a new nationalistic paradigm of memory laws as mnemonic weapons in ongoing memory wars. By tracing isomorphic similarities across Europe, this article reveals a mirroring of language that has recently appeared in the United States. It is with an eye towards worldwide shifts in populism that the current research remains urgent. This study offers a theoretical contribution from which memory scholars might draw when considering globally relevant mnemonic trends.

Anniversary Journalism in China: Mediated Memories of the Second World War

ABSTRACT The concept of prospective memory has been suggested as a way of theorising the importance of forward-looking memory in mediated accounts of past events. As yet, however, there was insufficient work to analyse the relationship between retrospective and prospective memory especially in collaborative journalistic cultures where one might expect the importance of prospective memory to be significant. Here, we apply the concept of mediated prospective memory, together with retrospective memory, to understand the commemoration of the end of the Second World War in China. We compare the commemoration—or indeed the absence of commemoration—in the People’s Daily over the last seven decades, showing how the Second World War was retrospectively remembered, which remaining geopolitical or domestic tasks the Chinese people were reminded of prospectively, and how retrospective memory has been reinterpreted over time in order to construct a narrative suiting the perceived changing needs of the future. Through doing so we contribute methodological and conceptual resources for the analysis of the relationship between retrospective and prospective mediated memory and commemorative journalism beyond China.

“We Will Discuss the Future and Dream Together”: Cultural and Artistic Life and the Museumification of Urban Space in Wartime Kharkiv

The article describes the experience of Kharkiv artists (both professional and amateur) who continued to live and create in the front-line metropolis after February 24, 2022. Attention is also given to several events that physically took place entirely or in part outside Kharkiv, but were aimed at the presentation of the city, with their organizers and target audience directly connected with it. The article shows that the making of fine art went on in Kharkiv during this time, musical works were performed, and theatrical productions were premiered. Both individual artists and collectives launched creative initiatives, and art festivals were held. Artistic practices influenced the life of the metropolis and became one of the forms of recording the memory of war. The author points out that creative work under conditions of persisting military danger had a psychotherapeutic effect on the participants, helping them to get through traumatic situations and supporting morale. Artists reflected in their work events they witnessed firsthand, and also occasionally used material objects generated by the war (such as shell fragments) to create new artistic artifacts — examples of “trench art.” Importantly, creative acts took place in iconic and recognizable city locations — for instance, at subway stations or near damaged historical and architectural landmarks. The article investigates the role of cultural and artistic practices in the process of the museumification of the urban space of Kharkiv during the full-scale Russian aggression. It is shown that already in the first months of the war, artists began to reflect on the fact that their creative practices will be included in future museum exhibits, as well as contribute to the emergence of new “sites of memory” in the urban space of Kharkiv.

Закон о демократической памяти в Испании: попытка консолидации или новая фаза конфликта?

Over the past twenty years, Spain has experienced a state of radical change in the public perception of key periods in the national history of the twentieth century, "wars of memory" determine the Spanish public mood, a significant part of political discourse and scientific research. On October 21, 2022, the Democratic Memory Law came into force in Spain. This event was preceded by a long period of political debate and public controversy. The law, presented by its authors as a means of consolidating state policy, broadcasting the traditions and values of democracy, paying tribute to those who fought for freedom, and prohibiting the justification of dictatorship, in the eyes of opponents looks like a provocation or a populist act, but by no means a means to overcome the conflict nature of Spanish society.

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

A Court in the Backlands: A Nomadic Justice in Brazilian Literature

, This paper explores a conception of justice through a reading of the Brazilian novel The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, written by João Guimarães Rosa. In this novel, the character of Zé Bebelo is tried by a group of jagunços, who were nomadic bandits that lived in the northeast of Brazil. What is analyzed in this scene is the spectral dimension of undecidability that involves a decision, and how a decision intervenes in a field of forces and reshapes the relationships and antagonisms of a conflict. I seek to show how this novel operates a counter-actualization of Brazilian history by updating and spotlighting the memory of violence and war that marks life in the peripheral regions of Brazil. Finally, I question how justice can be possible when war is a tendency internal to the functioning of societies. What concept of justice is possible when faced with this continuous tendency to disjoint the social body? I propose a concept of justice thought before the unbalanced, conflictive and differential relationships lived by the characters of this novel in the uncertain and contingent space of the Brazilian backlands.

МОЛОДЕЖЬ О ВЕЛИКОЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ВОЙНЕ: ВЗГЛЯД ИЗ РЕГИОНОВ РОССИИ*

This paper analyzes the results of a questionnaire survey among university students and schoolchildren which was a part of the sociological research conducted between December 2019 and January 2020. The article presents a comparative analysis of the perception of the Great Patriotic War events and results by young people in Russian regions. It is taken into account that in our country the popular consciousness sees the results and consequences of the 1941-1945 military actions as one of the most important integrating values that supports the system of the state and contributes to national unity. With regard to the historical memory of the war, in order to identify the existing trends in the political consciousness of young people the paper studies the issues of education and upbringing associated with shaping individual attitude to the events of that time among citizens aged 18-30 years. The perception of such values as patriotism and national identity by young people is analyzed. The research also takes into account whether the studied group is sufficiently informed about the objectivity of the events that took place and the results of the war, as well as the factors affecting the mental imagery of modern youth. The study addresses the nationwide trends regarding knowledge about the Great Patriotic War that manifest themselves in the population’s mass consciousness and how they are reflected in the youth environment. The authors consider individual cases in the ten subjects of Russia’s five federal districts noting existing socio-economic and political problems in the regions. The comparative analysis leads to the conclusion about the transformation of the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War in the political consciousness of modern youth and identifies a number of dangerous trends connected with the revision of historical facts in the youth environment of the Russian Federation.

Marten and Janney, eds., Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America

Reviewed by: Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America ed. by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney Gaines M. Foster Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America Edited by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 312. Notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $114.95; paperback, $36.95.) Anyone interested in how Americans thought about the Civil War in the late nineteenth century, even those familiar with the vast scholarship on Civil War memory, will find much that they did not know in Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. Edited by James Martin and Caroline E. Janney, the collection explores how America's emerging commercial culture portrayed the war. Its fifteen essays discuss the move of Richmond's Libby Prison to Chicago to become a museum; opiate addiction cures; veterans' publications, such as the Military Annals of Tennessee and the National Tribune; clocks, and other items offered as premiums to Tribune subscribers; United Confederate Veteran uniforms manufactured for and worn by Confederate veterans, which were different than their wartime uniforms; tobacco and other types of advertising that featured Civil War generals or battle scenes; illustrations of the Monitor and Merrimac; images of reunion and reconciliation; the greater popularity of Civil War photographs over stereoviews; the unpopularity of Oliver Optic's books for young readers; public lectures on the war; Milton Bradley's Myriopticon: A Historical Panorama of the Rebellion, which presented the war in a roll of illustrations; and Civil War cycloramas. In addition to the discussions of all these "products and services," there is also an essay [End Page 342] on attitudes toward both the Union and Confederate war debt, although it seems a little out of place. From what the editors term their "ground level view," the essays interpreting these and other commercial enterprises expand an understanding of society's memory of the Civil War on the eve of the twentieth century. They stress the important role that profit seeking and a growing commercial and industrial economy played in making references to the war common in postwar culture. In the process, as several of the essays show, commercial products not only kept the memory of the war alive, they also promoted the values of a modern industrial economy, particularly in presenting a model of behavior for young males. Demonstrating how the modernizing economy shaped Civil War memory, and how that memory supported the emerging society, is an important contribution. So, too, are the essays' observations on how many non-veterans sought to experience the war, although most of them had reservations about experiences that were too intense or realistic. Several essays also emphasize the veterans' need to have society understand the traumas of battle and acknowledge their heroism and honor. While earlier studies have stressed a common need among Confederate veterans to be recognized, these essays show that northern veterans shared that desire. Most of the essays, in fact, focus on the North rather than on the South, which reinforces the growing appreciation that the war's memory remained important above as well as below the Mason-Dixon line. Although a few essays provide evidence of northerners' criticism of southern society, and lingering hostilities toward their former enemies, most argue or assume that by 1900, both sections had embraced reconciliation. Those that stress reconciliation find it in stories or images of the period that portray common heroism and sacrifice and avoid potentially divisive issues. Slavery and the role of African Americans in the war were featured in a few northern writings or pictures, as some authors show; more often, popular culture ignored or demeaned Blacks, which facilitated white reconciliation. The collective insights of these diverse essays make a significant contribution to understanding Civil War memory, and the individual essays provide intriguing analyses of a host of things ignored in earlier studies. [End Page 343] Gaines M. Foster Louisiana State University Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Indiana University

When San Francisco Met Tennessee: Civil War Memory, Racial Violence, and the Costs of Sectional Reconciliation during the Spanish-American War

During the Spanish-American War, the First Tennessee Volunteer Infantry was one of fourteen state volunteer regiments mobilized and trained in San Francisco before deployment to the Philippines. Historians have written several detailed accounts of the First Tennessee’s visit to San Francisco, but the controversies that the regiment generated during its western travels have yet to be closely examined. In the most dramatic incident, nearly half of the regiment stormed out of the Presidio army base into a local neighborhood, in an attempt to lynch a Black San Franciscan named Daniel Thomas. Although the Southern regiment’s scandals sparked a brief period of tension in San Francisco, the city’s memories of these events quickly faded into the national narrative of sectional reconciliation. This essay reexamines the significance of the First Tennessee’s visit to San Francisco through the lens of the Thomas family’s experiences, considering these events within the broader historical arcs of American sectional reunion and overseas imperialism.

What Helped Support Nurses in the ED at CWM during the COVID-19 Outbreak in Fiji in 2021?

Background/Introduction:Following a quarantine breach in April 2021, Fiji went from no cases of COVID-19 to having the highest number per capita in the world. Fiji was relatively well-prepared to respond to COVID-19 as it has strong emergency management response systems. Nevertheless, due to the rapid increase, the public health system was quickly overwhelmed. The problem was particularly acute at the main tertiary hospital in Suva.Objectives:To describe the effects of an overwhelming COVID-19 outbreak on nurses working in the Emergency Department of Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Fiji, in 2021.To describe the lessons learned and recommendations for the future.Method/Description:Focus Group Discussion with two groups of nurses: (1) ED nurse and (2) nurses seconded to provide a surge workforce in the most acute phase.Results/Outcomes:Preliminary findings show that nurses were lacking in confidence and frightened about the growing epidemic. Resources, material and human, were initially in short supply. The agency of the nurses as result of their post-graduate study and due to the collegial environment in ED resulted in increased supplies of PPE and changes to nursing practice (eg, web-based handover). Final results pending.Conclusion:The preliminary findings of this research illustrate that even in low-resource settings, with the right support and effective nursing leadership, nurses can provide safe and effective care to patients. The research illustrates the benefits of sound, relevant education, the crucial importance of teamwork, the importance of networks, the important benefits of early deployment of the MET, and the need for effective nursing leadership.

Problema konstruirovaniya istoricheskoj pamyati v sovremennom mire

Wie article discusses such concepts as “historical memory”, “cultural memory”, “post-memory”, “digital memory". It is emphasized that with the advent of network communication, the construction of the image of the past ceased to be the prerogative of professional historians and turned into a “collective project”. The authors emphasize that these changes correspond to the postmodern concept of plurality. It is noted that the digital environment strengthens and creates new forms of conflicts of historical consciousness: different versions of the past turn into competing narratives, provoke memory wars.