Why do certain works of art make it into the canon while others just enjoy a brief moment of recognition, if at all? How do moments produce monuments, and why are monuments erased from our cultural memory in only a moment? - Taking into account these cultural processes of creating, storing, remembering and forgetting that are omnipresent and have an immense influence on how we perceive artefacts and cultural events, the articles in this collection analyze the phenomenon of cultural production, transmission and reception from various angles, drawing on approaches from both literary and cultural studies. With its transdisciplinary approach, this book uniquely responds to an everyday cultural phenomenon that so far has not received such wide-ranging attention.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Skyscrapers, Churches, and Bridges comes a stunning visual history that serves as a tribute to classic American landmarks.

Ranging across the longue durée of Thailand’s history, Monastery, Monument, Museum is an eminently readable and original contribution to the study of the kingdom’s art and culture. Eschewing issues of dating, style, and iconography, historian Maurizio Peleggi addresses distinct types of artifacts and artworks as both the products and vehicles of cultural memory. From the temples of Chiangmai to the Emerald Buddha, from the National Museum of Bangkok to the prehistoric culture of Northeast Thailand, and from the civic monuments of the 1930s to the political artworks of the late twentieth century, even well-known artworks and monuments reveal new meanings when approached from this perspective. Part I, “Sacred Geographies,” focuses on the premodern era, when religious credence informed the cultural alteration of landscape, and devotional sites and artifacts, including visual representation of the Buddhist cosmology, were created. Part II, “Antiquities, Museums, and National History,” covers the 1830s through the 1970s, when antiquarianism, and eventually archaeology, emerged and developed in the kingdom, partly the result of a shift in the elites’ worldview and partly a response to colonial and neocolonial projects of knowledge. Part III, “Discordant Mnemoscapes,” deals with civic monuments and artworks that anchor memory of twentieth-century political events and provide stages for both their commemoration and counter-commemoration by evoking the country’s embattled political present. Monastery, Monument, Museum shows us how cultural memory represents a kind of palimpsest, the result of multiple inscriptions, reworkings, and manipulations over time. The book will be a rewarding read for historians, art historians, anthropologists, and Buddhism scholars working on Thailand and Southeast Asia generally, as well as for academic and general readers with an interest in memory and material culture.

Mystic Chords of Memory "Illustrated with hundreds of well-chosen anecdotes and minute observations . . . Kammen is a demon researcher who seems to have mined his nuggets from the entire corpus of American cultural history . . . insightful and sardonic." —Washington Post Book World In this ground-breaking, panoramic work of American cultural history, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Machine That Would Go of Itself examines a central paradox of our national identity How did "the land of the future" acquire a past? And to what extent has our collective memory of that past—as embodied in our traditions—have been distorted, or even manufactured? Ranging from John Adams to Ronald Reagan, from the origins of Independence Day celebrations to the controversies surrounding the Vietnam War Memorial, from the Daughters of the American Revolution to immigrant associations, and filled with incisive analyses of such phenonema as Americana and its collectors, "historic" villages and Disneyland, Mystic Chords of Memory is a brilliant, immensely readable, and enormously important book. "Fascinating . . . a subtle and teeming narrative . . . masterly." —Time "This is a big, ambitious book, and Kammen pulls it off admirably. . . . [He] brings a prodigious mind and much scholarly rigor to his task . . . an importnat book—and a revealing look at how Americans look at themselves." —Milwaukee Journal

Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry " Trethewey's poems] dig beneath the surface of history--personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago--to explore the human struggles that we all face." --James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress Layering joy and urgent defiance--against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone--Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey's first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet's own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love. In this setting, each section, each poem drawn from an "opus of classics both elegant and necessary,"* weaves and interlocks with those that come before and those that follow. As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poet's remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very foundation of the vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future. *Academy of American Poets' chancellor Marilyn Nelson

On September 11, 2001, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, became a center of national attention when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a former strip mine in sleepy Somerset County, killing all forty passengers and crew aboard. This is the story of the memorialization that followed, from immediate, unofficial personal memorials to the ten-year effort to plan and build a permanent national monument to honor those who died. It is also the story of the unlikely community that developed through those efforts. As the country struggled to process the events of September 11, temporary memorials—from wreaths of flowers to personalized T-shirts and flags—appeared along the chain-link fences that lined the perimeter of the crash site. They served as evidence of the residents’ need to pay tribute to the tragedy and of the demand for an official monument. Weaving oral accounts from Shanksville residents and family members of those who died with contemporaneous news reports and records, J. William Thompson traces the creation of the monument and explores the larger narrative of memorialization in America. He recounts the crash and its sobering immediate impact on area residents and the nation, discusses the history of and controversies surrounding efforts to permanently commemorate the event, and relates how locals and grief-stricken family members ultimately bonded with movers and shakers at the federal level to build the Flight 93 National Memorial. A heartfelt examination of memory, place, and the effects of tragedy on small-town America, this fact-driven account of how the Flight 93 National Memorial came to be is a captivating look at the many ways we strive as communities to forever remember the events that change us.

Traces the history of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., discussing its plan and structures, and considering how the concept of memorials and memorial space has changed since the nineteenth century.