The first general history of the National Mall in Washington, America's most important urban park. The Mall is home to the Smithsonian Institution, the largest museum complex in the world, and it is the location of memorials to America's most important heroes. It has become the nation's center stage as well, the venue for the country's largest demonstrations. The Washington National Mall details the history of the National Mall and its institutions, then tells the stories behind each of the monuments and museums.

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.

Describes the history of the National Mall and the buildings around it.

For the city’s first two hundred years, the story told at Washington DC’s symbolic center, the National Mall, was about triumphant American leaders. Since 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated, the narrative has shifted to emphasize the memory of American wars. In the last thirty years, five significant war memorials have been built on, or very nearly on, the Mall. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, The National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During WWII, and the National World War II Memorial have not only transformed the physical space of the Mall but have also dramatically rewritten ideas about U.S. nationalism expressed there. In Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall, Kristin Ann Hass examines this war memorial boom, the debates about war and race and gender and patriotism that shaped the memorials, and the new narratives about the nature of American citizenship that they spawned. Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall explores the meanings we have made in exchange for the lives of our soldiers and asks if we have made good on our enormous responsibility to them.

Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories vividly illustrates that a nation’s history is more complicated than the simple binary of remembered/forgotten. Some parts of history, while not formally recognized within a commemorative landscape, haunt those landscapes by virtue of their ephemeral or displaced presence. Rather than being discretely contained within a formal sites, these memories remain public by lingering along the edges and within the crevices of commemorative landscapes. By integrating theories of haunting, place, and public memory, this collection demonstrates that the National Mall, often referred to as “the nation’s front yard,” might better be understood as “the nation’s attic” because it hides those issues we do not want to address but cannot dismiss. The neatly ordered installations and landscaping of the National Mall, if one looks and listens closely, reveal the messiness of US history. From the ephemeral memories of protests on the Mall to the displaced but persistent presences of inequality, each chapter in this book examines the ways in which contemporary public life in the US is haunted by incomplete efforts to close the book on the past.

Cover -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Tables and Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. From Grand Avenue to Public Space: A Brief History of the Mall -- PART I: MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES -- 2. Neglecting the Mall -- 3. Managing the Mall -- PART II: USE AND DEVELOPMENT PRESSURES -- 4. Making Space for the Dream -- 5. The Brawl on the Mall -- 6. Securing the Mall -- PART III: PLANNING AND PUBLIC PARTICIPATION -- 7. Whose Mall Is It? -- 8. The Right to the Mall -- 9. Envisioning the Twenty-First-Century Mall -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index