Bradley S. Keefer. Conflicting Memories on the “River of Death”

The stubborn idea that heritage and history are irreconcilable lingers, but most historians who work in the public sector operate in the space between them. The best scholarship on history and memory has focused attention on this space, analyzing memorials and historic sites as stages for reconciling popular and professional interpretations of the past. This body of literature has grown dramatically in the last thirty years. Spurred by the public response to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, scholars began to examine the cultural significance of commemorative activities. Histories examining the effort to remember—or to forget—war and tragedy have been particularly influential. Two recent works in this genre raise important questions about power and agency in the space between history and memory. Both A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek and Conflicting Memories on the “River of Death”: The Chickamauga Battlefield and the Spanish-American War, 1863–1933 explore the relative place of experience, recollection, and research in the creation of cultural meaning and historical significance. In Conflicting Memories, Bradley S. Keefer reconstructs the experiences of two generations of soldiers who fought or trained on the Chickamauga Creek in northern Georgia. He explores the impact that both commemorative and practical activities have had on the site's preservation as a battlefield park. In A Misplaced Massacre, Ari Kelman analyzes the effort to establish the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in Colorado. These works demonstrate that both history and heritage have the potential to challenge or to legitimize the myths that underscore American national identity.

Agency (philosophy) · Ancient history · Archaeology · Battlefield · Collective memory · Historic site · Political science · Power (physics) · Public history · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies