““Sacrilege of a Strange, Contemporary Kind””

The Unknown Soldier and the Imagined Community after the Vietnam War

Datos Bibliográficos

ID19438245
AutoresAllen Allen (autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen23
Número2
Páginas90
Fecha de publicación2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory and Memory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0935-560X • E-ISSN: 1527-1994
EditorialIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/histmemo.23.2.90
OpenAlexW2115910052
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas23

In 1998 the Unknown Soldier from the Vietnam War was exhumed, identified and returned to his family. This article explains that remarkable turn of events, complicating claims that it resulted from scientific advances and suggesting that it originated in a political challenge to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It shows that the grassroots activists who first named the Vietnam Unknown had long opposed his interment as a memorialized forgetting of the war and argues that their effort to open the Tomb succeeded because their claims of ongoing veteran victimization resonated with Americans in ways that the Tomb's vision of redemptive sacrifice did not

Ancient history · Archaeology · Sociology · Vietnam War · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Military History and Strategy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies