American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory
The gold epaulettes that George Washington wore into battle. A Union soldier’s bloody shirt in the wake of the Civil War. A crushed wristwatch after the 9/11 attacks. The bullet-riddled door of the Pulse nightclub. Volatile and shape-shifting, relics have long played a role in memorializing the American past, acting as physical reminders of hard-won battles, mass tragedies, and political triumphs.
Surveying the expanse of U.S. history, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory shows how these objects have articulated glory, courage, and national greatness as well as horror, defeat, and oppression. While relics mostly signified heroism in the nation’s early years, increasingly, they have acquired a new purpose—commemorating victimhood. The atrocious artifacts of lynching and the looted remains of Native American graves were later transformed into shameful things, exposing ongoing racial violence and advancing calls for equality and civil rights. Matthew Dennis pursues this history of fraught public objects and assesses the emergence of new venues of memorialization, such as virtual and digital spaces. Through it all, relics continue to fundamentally ground and shape U.S. public memory in its uncertain present and future.‘American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory is a fantastic nudge, a book that offers up its author’s 'delight at human . . . weirdness' as encouragement for historians to revisit the past by rethinking the relic.’—Seth C. Bruggeman, Journal of the Early Republic
‘Through showing both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, Dennis gives us a more balanced vision of US material history than is often available, and pushes us to always consider the context in which an object was made and politically sanctified.’—Anastasia Pratt, H-Net
‘In prose that is scholarly, compelling, and an absolute joy to read, Dennis clearly demonstrates how relics function as a special kind of object in American culture. American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory stands to be one of the most important histories of material culture and commemoration in decades.’—Sarah J. Purcell, author of Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America‘Dennis deftly draws upon an impressive range of scholarship from museum studies, historic preservation, and public history to explore the many ways that Americans have invested memory and meaning in relics, collected and cherished or abhorred them, and used them to promote desired outcomes from consensus to violence.’—Alea Henle, author of Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States
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