Commemoration: The American Association for State and Local History Guide

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Commemoration: The American Association for State and Local History Guide serves as a handbook for historic site managers, heritage professionals, and all manner of public historians who contend daily with the ground-level complexities of commemoration. Its fourteen short essays are intended as tools for practitioners, students, and anyone else confronted with common problems in commemorative practice today. Of particular concern are strategies for expanding commemoration across the panoply of American identities, confronting tragedy and difficult pasts, and doing responsible work in the face of persistent economic and political turmoil. A special afterword explores the role of emotion in modern commemoration and what it suggests about possibilities for engaging new audiences.

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While stone and metal monuments, sanctioned landscapes, and applied commemorative phrases might appear stationary, their value and role will always be fluid continuously evolving to serve the dynamism of future generations. This collection of essays assembled by Seth C. Bruggeman encourages public historians and other heritage professionals to rattle public memory, to challenge complacent narratives, and to scrutinize and reclaim public memory in order to purposely and productively make remembrances relevant. -- Julia Rose, director and curator, Johns Hopkins University Homewood Museum Baltimore, Maryland and author, Interpreting Difficult History at Historic Sites and Museums, (2016)

Author Bio

Seth C. Bruggeman is an associate professor of History at Temple University, where he periodically directs the Center for Public History. His books include Born in the USA: Birth and Commemoration in American Public Memory, and Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument.