HIST 488
Sites of Memory and American Wars Fall 2024
Division II W Writing Skills

This tutorial will examine the ways that U.S. military ventures have been memorialized through a variety of physical sites, including landscapes, monuments and statues, museums, and other depictions. Given the enormous national conversation and reconsideration of many of these sites over the last decade, we will ask such questions as: How and why has the memorialization of U.S. wars changed since the country’s founding? Who determines what is preserved and what stories are told? What is the relationship between individual experiences, collective memories, and national narratives? What do “sites of memory” tell us about society’s views of wars and soldiers and about the United States? Throughout, we will pay attention to how these sites reflect historical understandings of the time and have also served as focal points of social and political protests.