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Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. By Michael Kammen. (New York: Knopf, 1991. viii + 864 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-394-57769-8.)
Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. By John Bodnar. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xiv + 296 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-04783-9.)
From grade school curricula to museum exhibitions, from assessments of historical amnesia to controversies about multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, and the Columbian quincentenary, struggles over the content, meaning, purpose, and shaping of collective memory have in the last several years become foci of remarkable political and cultural contention in the United States.
It is more than serendipitous that at just this moment two major books appear that locate this phenomenon itself in history. Joined in this respect by timing and focus, these are, however, actually quite different studies. John Bodnar is concerned with specific patterns of commemoration, as shaped by the even more particular problematic of patriotism. The broader dimensions of memory and history serve as tools to this explanatory end, framing an ultimately political history of a specific dimension of public life. Michael Kammen's concern is in some ways the opposite: he works out from the concrete problematics of memory; the evolution and politics of tradition, examined in a staggeringly diverse array of particular embodiments, become nothing less than the organizing axis for an original and sweeping history of American culture. As this suggests, the capacities of Kammen's and Bodnar's works are inverse and complementary: together the books accomplish perhaps more than either one could individually to map the shared terrain they come to by different routes.
"Official" and "vernacular" are, for Bodnar, poles defining the cultural space surrounding historic commemoration: history publicly invoked and recalled to promote unity, cohesion, and political consensus, as distinct from a history grounded in particularity, immediacy, concrete remembrance, and the personal and local ground of historical experience. He offers a carefully organized and precisely rendered sequence of extensive case studies of public commemoration. These begin with village, town, ethnic group, and city celebrations; move on to midwestern state and regional commemorations, where the pull between "patriotic" and "pioneer" evocations embodies much of the official/vernacular tension; and conclude with studies of the National Park Service and the modern "bookends" of...