War and Remembrance

Thomas H. Conner offers an agency history of the American Battle Monuments Commission (Abmc) that recounts the commission's important story with an emphasis on its creation and on General of Armies John J. Pershing's role from 1923 until his death in 1948. Connor notes that the Abmc's initial mission when it began in 1923 was to create and guard U.S. overseas cemeteries and memorials, and “to identify some of the most important implications of that fact” (p. 5). Well grounded in archival sources and interviews with Abmc personnel, the majority of the book details the creation and maintenance of these international locations. Even though their meaning and implications are established early on, they are not interrogated throughout the book. Conner notes that “the sites generate broadly positive feeling abroad toward our country” and that they would be, in the words of Secretary of War John Weeks, “very beneficial in tightening the bond of friendship between the United States and France” (pp. 9, 44). Although the Abmc did not dedicate its first interpretive center until 2007, each of its sites unquestionably provides interpretation of historic events, but visitors may or may not understand the implications of each site's development. Conner does not address the sites' meanings directly but instead references the importance of the local hosts and their relationships to the sites. The main contribution of War and Remembrance is the recounting of the initial issues that led the Abmc's creation, which included the need to stop privately funded monuments from being placed on cemetery grounds. Some the book's most interesting contributions illuminate the goals of the Abmc, which included ensuring that no site resembled the disorganized nature of the Gettysburg battlefield commemoration; that each site would have a chapel, architecture, art, permanent perimeter stone walls, and markers for unknown soldiers; and that the memorials would resemble British sites, “where everything is of the best” (p. 60). As the Abmc attempted to end private memorialization on these sites, Conner cites many examples of how this policy was continually challenged by individuals and organizations, thus illustrating that the commission's control was not “airtight” (p. 76). These anecdotes enliven the history

Agency (philosophy · Archaeology · Battle · Commission · Feeling · Friendship · Guard (computer science · Interpretation (philosophy · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Archaeological Research and Protection · History · Law · Psychology

• To Ensure that these Emotions are Passed to the Next Generation

  Open Access•Albertine Bloemendal•European Journal of American…•2023

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