Memorials and Public Feeling in America

Realms of Memory

Americans are living in an age of frenzied memorial making, argues University of Texas at Dallas art and cultural historian Erika Doss. We saturate the public landscape with memorials to every conceivable cause, aggrieved group, or unsung hero. What do memorials tell us about Americans and America today? In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss contends that memorials embody public emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger. They help process tragic events like school shootings or terrorist attacks. They allow us to express our gratitude for past sacrifices or shame for episodes that run counter to our shared values and ideals. At their best, memorials allow for our participation in the process of memory making. They can be powerfully therapeutic, encouraging conversations and engaged, critical thinking about the past. At their worst, they can entrench us in our emotions, lock us into self-gratulatory modes of thought, or magnify our fears without helping us to understand the hows and whys of what we are memorializing.