"Penetrating insight into the processes by which our collective historical memory is constructed. Through a range of case studies, the authors explore how and why certain landscapes and monuments are intentionally endowed with specific messages, why certain stories are obscured or forgotten, and how collective memories change over time." --James Delle, Franklin and Marshall College The authors in this collection show how the creation of a collective memory of highly visible objects and landscapes is an ongoing struggle, their meanings always being constructed, changed, and challenged. The sites and symbols the authors address are nationally recognized and include a balance of places that illuminate class, ethnic, racial, and historical experiences. Focusing on material culture, they explore the tensions that exist among various groups--elite landowners, the National Park Service, preservationists, minority groups--who compete for control over the interpretation of American public history. CONTENTS Foreword, by Edward T. Linenthal Introduction: The Making of the American Landscape, by Paul A. Shackel Part I: An Exclusionary Past, by Paul A. Shackel 1. Of Saints and Sinners: Mythic Landscapes of the Old and New South, by Audrey J. Horning 2. The Woman Movement: Memorial to Women's Rights Leaders and the Perceived Images of the Women's Movement, by Courtney Workman 3. The Third Battle of Manassas: Power, Identity, and the Forgotten African-American Past, by Erika K. Martin Seibert 4. Remembering a Japanese-American Concentration Camp at Manzanar National Historic Site, by Janice L. Dubel 5. Wounded Knee: The Conflict of Interpretation, by Gail Brown Part II: Commemoration and the Making of a Patriotic Past, by Paul A. Shackel 6. Freeze-Frame, September 17, 1862: A Preservation Battle at Antietam National Battlefield Park, by Martha Temkin 7. The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial: Redefining the Role of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, by Paul A. Shackel 8. Buried in the Rose Garden: Levels of Meaning at Arlington National Cemetery and the Robert E. Lee Memorial, by Laurie Burgess Part III: Nostalgia and the Legitimation of American Heritage, by Paul A. Shackel 9. Authenticity, Legitimation, and Twentieth-Century Tourism: The John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Carriage Roads, Acadia National Park, Maine, by Matthew M. Palus 10. The Birthplace of a Chief: Archaeology and Meaning at George Washington Birthplace National Monument, by Joy Beasley 11. Nostalgia and Tourism: Camden Yards in Baltimore, by Erin Donovan 12. Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace Cabin: The Making of an American Icon, by Dwight T. Pitcaithley Paul A. Shackel, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, is the author of Archaeology and Created Memory: Public History in a National Park; Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era; and Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695-1870.

In recent years in archaeology there has been increasing acknowledgement of the 'afterlife' of monuments and other features in the landscape, and the role of the past in the past, along with discussions of the spatial and chronological links manifested in monument complexes and ritual landscapes.

In studying the past, archaeologists have focused on the material remains of our ancestors. Prehistorians generally have only artifacts to study and rely on the diverse material record for their understanding of past societies and their behavior. Those involved in studying historically documented cultures not only have extensive material remains but also contemporary texts, images, and a range of investigative technologies to enable them to build a broader and more reflexive picture of how past societies, communities, and individuals operated and behaved. Increasingly, historical archaeology refers not to a particular period, place, or a method, but rather an approach that interrogates the tensions between artifacts and texts irrespective of context. In short, historical archaeology provides direct evidence for how humans have shaped the world we live in today. Historical archaeology is a branch of global archaeology that has grown in the last 40 years from its North American base into an increasingly global community of archaeologists each studying their area of the world in a historical context. Where historical archaeology started as part of the study of the post-Columbian societies of the United States and Canada, it has now expanded to interface with the post-medieval archaeologies of Europe and the diverse post-imperial experiences of Africa, Latin America, and Australasia. The 36 essays in the International Handbook of Historical Archaeology have been specially commissioned from the leading researchers in their fields, creating a wide-ranging digest of the increasingly global field of historical archaeology. The volume is divided into two sections, the first reviewing the key themes, issues, and approaches of historical archaeology today, and the second containing a series of case studies charting the development and current state of historical archaeological practice around the world. This key reference work captures the energy and diversity of this global discipline today.

The Oxford Handbook of Public History introduces the major debates within public history; the methods and sources that comprise a public historian's tool kit; and exemplary examples of practice. It views public history as a dynamic process combining historical research and a wide range of work with and for the public, informed by a conceptual context. The editors acknowledge the imprecision bedeviling attempts to define public history, and use this book as an opportunity to shape the field by taking a deliberately broad view. They include professional historians who work outside the academy in a range of institutions and sites, and those who are politically committed to communicating history to the wide range of audiences. This volume provides the information and inspiration needed by a practitioner to succeed in the wide range of workplaces that characterizes public history today, for university teachers of public history to assist their students, and for working public historians to keep up to date with recent research. This handbook locates public history as a professional practice within an intellectual framework that is increasingly transnational, technological, and democratic. While the nation state remains the primary means of identification, increased mobility and the digital revolution have occasioned a much broader outlook and awareness of the world beyond national borders. It addresses squarely the tech-savvy, media-literate citizens of the world, the"digital natives" of the twenty-first century, in a way that recognizes the revolution in shared authority that has swept museum work, oral history, and much of public history practice. This volume also provides both currently practicing historians and those entering the field a map for understanding the historical landscape of the future: not just to the historiographical debates of the academy but also the boom in commemoration and history outside the academy evident in many countries since the 1990s, which now constitutes the historical culture in each country. Public historians need to understand both contexts, and to negotiate their implications for questions of historical authority and the public historian's work. The boom in popular history is characterized by a significant increase in both making and consuming history in a range of historical activities such as genealogy, family history, and popular collecting; cultural tourism, historic sites, and memorial museums; increased memorialization, both formal and informal, from roadside memorials to state funded shrines and memorial Internet sites; increased publication of historical novels, biographies, and movies and TV series set in the past. Much of this, as well as a vast array of new community cultural projects, has been facilitated by the digital technologies that have increased the accessibility of historical information, the democratization of practice, and the demand for sharing authority.

In Creating a Confederate Kentucky, Anne E. Marshall traces the development of a Confederate identity in Kentucky between 1865 and 1925, belying the fact that Kentucky never left the Union. After the Civil War, the people of Kentucky appeared to forget their Union loyalties and embraced the Democratic politics, racial violence, and Jim Crow laws associated with former Confederate states. Marshall looks beyond postwar political and economic factors to the longer-term commemorations of the Civil War by which Kentuckians fixed the state's remembrance of the conflict for the following sixty years.

Spectacular recent discoveries from the Nathan Harrison cabin site offer new insights and perspectives into the life of this former slave and legendary California homesteader. “In many ways, it is a quintessential American story because of the fact that slavery was the American story.”—Julia A. King, St. Mary’s College of Maryland Few people in the history of the United States embody ideals of the American Dream more than Nathan Harrison. His is a story with prominent themes of overcoming staggering obstacles, forging something-from-nothing, and evincing gritty perseverance. In a lifetime of hard-won progress, Harrison survived the horrors of slavery in the Antebellum South, endured the mania of the California Gold Rush, and prospered in the rugged chaos of the Wild West. From the introduction: According to dozens of accounts, Harrison would routinely greet visitors to his remote Southern California hillside property with the introductory quip, “I’m N——r Nate, the first white man on the mountain.” This is by far the most common direct quote in all of the extensive Harrison lore. If it is possible to get past current-day shock and outrage over the inflammatory racial epithet, one can begin to contextualize and appreciate the ironic humor, ethnic insight, and dualistically crafted identities Harrison employed in this profound statement.

This groundbreaking volume arose out of the Postcolonial Roundtable in 2010, with contributors addressing the intersection of postcolonialism and evangelicalism. Looking at themes like nationalism, mission, Christology, catholicity and shalom, this volume explores new possibilities for evangelical thought, identity and practice.