History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration

Savage, Kirk

“Monuments are good for nothing,” a North Carolina Congressman declared in 1800. In the founding years of the United States, many argued that democracy and the spread of literacy had made commemorative rituals and monuments obsolete, a leftover from the days of monarchy and superstition. Reflecting on Congress’s reluctance to fund a monument to George Washington, John Quincy Adams famously observed that “democracy has no monuments.” “True memory,” many Americans liked to claim, lay not in a pile of dead stones but in the living hearts of the people. Since those early days of the Republic, democracy has changed its tune. Commemoration has become utterly commonplace, deeply rooted in the cultural practices of the nation. Not only did Americans come to embrace traditional forms of commemoration, but they pioneered new practices, particularly in the remembrance of war dead. Today American commemorative practices have multiplied and spread in ways no one could have imagined, extending now even into the solar system (with a monument to the fallen Columbia crew on Mars). While commemorative practices have been expanding for nearly two centuries, the academic literature on commemoration has mushroomed in the past twenty years. So many scholars from such a variety of disciplines have joined the “memory boom” that mapping the field has become effectively impossible. Moreover, scholars often talk at cross purposes with one another or simply in ignorance of each other’s work. This essay, while by necessity impressionistic, will try to pinpoint key questions, debates, findings, and trends. The first key question might be, what is commemoration? Dictionary definitions tell us that to commemorate is to “call to remembrance,” to mark an event or a person or a group by a ceremony or an observance or a monument of some kind. Commemorations might be ephemeral or permanent; the key point is that they prod collective memory in some conspicuous way.