I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. Ayard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like anextended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around theedges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm treeand wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.

J. T. declined to put on a shirt but instead disappearedinto the

The issue of race certainly has cast a large shadow on the contributions of oneof the most successful recording artists in the history of the music industry; Pres-ley’s legacy undoubtedly is a contested one. But then again, the man himself oftenseemed downright conflicted as to who or what he was. Dubbed the “HillbillyCat,” the “King of Western Bop,” the “Bopping Hillbilly,” and a “white nigger” bycontemporaries, the culturally schizophrenic Presley routinely erased artistic andsocietal borders, defying easy categorization. Was he a genuine rhythm and bluesenthusiast appreciative of black talent and equality? Or was he a “racist redneck”who profited at the expense of the authentic African American performers hein fact despised? The answers depend on who is responding, and the responsesreadily recall the insight of two critics writing in 1958, who surely did not antici-pate the longevity of their counsel: “As a subject for polemic, Elvis Presley hasfew peers.”

onely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard,” blared theheadline of a late-summer special edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. “The King is Dead.” Much like his explosive ascentnearly a generation earlier, Elvis Presley’s untimely demise onAugust 16, 1977, left many “all shook up.” Grieving fans by thethousands trekked to Memphis for the wake and funeral; millions more paid theirrespects by besieging radio stations and record stores, listening to songs and look-ing for Presley products. Commenting on the mass anguish, one veteran colum-nist recalled that he had witnessed many instances of public mourning since theassassination of President John Kennedy, “but nothing has equaled the presentnational grief.” The mainstream media, unprepared for the passionate and ubiq-uitous response that Presley’s passing engendered, resorted to repeating by rotethe distinctive American tale of an anonymous truck driver whose unrestrainedperformance style and meteoric rise to fame flustered the less than frenzied fifties.A stock script asserted that Presley symbolized the twentieth-century version ofthe heroic pioneer blazing trails into an unknown frontier, an unlikely rebel whoset the stage for a countercultural insurgency that later would shake the sixties. Asone editorial aptly extolled, “Elvis really started something.”1

This was the image of the American woman in the year Castroled a revolution in Cuba and men were trained to travel into outer ·space; the year that the African continent brought forth new na- .tions, and a plane whose speed is greater than the speed of soundbroke up a Summit Conference; the year artists picketed a greatmuseum in protest against the hegemony of abstract art; physicistsexplored the concept of anti-matter; astronomers, because of newradio telescopes, had to alter their concepts of the expanding uni-verse; biologists made a breakthrough in the fundamental chemis-try of life; and Negro youth in Southern schools forced theUnited States, for the first time since the Civil War, to face amoment of democratic truth. But this magazine, published forover 5,000,000 American women, almost all of whom have beenthrough high school and nearly half to college, contained almostno mention of the world beyond the home. In the second half ofthe twentieth century in America, woman's world was confinedto her own body and beauty, the charming of man, the bearing ofbabies, and the physical care and serving of husband, children, andhome. And this was no anomaly of a single issue of a singlewomen's magazine.

y have so many American wives suffered thisnameless aching dissatisfaction for so many years,each one thinking she was alone? "I've got tears inmy eyes with sheer relief that my own inner tur-moil is shared with other women," a young Connecticut motherwrote me when I first began to put this problem into words. 1 Awoman from a town in Ohio wrote: "The times when I felt thatthe only answer was to consult a psychiatrist, times of anger,bitterness and general frustration too numerous to even mention,I had no idea that hundreds of other women were feeling the sameway. I felt so completely alone." A Houston, Texas, housewifewrote: "It has been the feeling of being almost alone with myproblem that has made it so hard. I thank God for my family,home and the chance to care for them, but my life couldn't stopthere. It is an awakening to know that I'm not an oddity and canstop being ashamed of wanting something more.

The major advocate of working women's rights was the Wom-en's Bureau, headed by Mary Anderson. It lobbied for enforce-ment of equal-pay regulations, upgrading of wages in consumergoods industries and other female-dominated fields, provisionof adequate household services, and institution of gender-blindjob classifications. 30 The Women's Advisory Committee to theWMC also pressed for a more progressive perspective, onewhich recognized that women most often entered the laborforce out of economic necessity and that their interests de-served some protection. It went so far as to warn the WMC in1944 that the initial expectations of war workers rested on in-correct assumptions about women who sought paying jobs:"Government and industry must not assume that all womencan be treated as a reserve group during war only, nor shouldthose who wish to stay in the labor market be accused of takingmen's jobs .... any easy assumption that a great number ofwomen will return to their homes is to be seriously ques-tioned."31 Neither the Women's Bureau nor the Women'sAdvisory Committee had enough power to implement such rec-ommendations, however, and their attempts to alter the short-term orientation of government planners were futile."2

E predominant media portrayal of women war workerswas that they were young, white, and middle-class; further-more, that they entered the labor force out of patriotic motivesand eagerly left to start families and resume full-time home-making. As historians have studied the war period, it has be-come clear that this image is almost completely false.' Contraryto popular belief, the women who entered war production werenot primarily middle-class housewives but working-classwives, widows, divorcees, and students who needed the moneyto achieve a reasonable standard of living. Most of them hadprewar experience in the labor force. A Women's Bureau surveyof ten war production areas analyzed the work histories of em-ployed women in 1944 and discovered that only 25 percent hadless than two years' work experience. Almost half had been inthe labor force at least five years and almost 30 percent at leastten.

O N A BEAUI'IFUL late June day in 1988 it was my good fortune to be inHonolulu when the second of two famous battleships associated withWorld War II came into port. The USS Missouri was returning from thePacific, where it had been engaged in war games, and I was invited to tourthe ship, an invitation I eagerly accepted. My memories of the Missouristretch back to childhood, when I impatiently waited for the mailman todeliver the first plastic model I ever built, the battleship on which theJapanese surrender was accepted by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Now, as Iconjured up images of defeated Japanese military and diplomatic figuresstanding stoically on the surrender deck, facing stem and proud Americans,their allies in the background, I found myself actually standing on that deck.As I moved forward to the silver chain that guards the area where thesurrender table once stood, now marked by a brass plate covered by a plasticbubble, I recalled MacArthur's hopeful words, that "from this solemn oc-casion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of thepast." 1 I thought about the curious new world that did emerge, a worldthat made the Missouri, still awesome to behold, a poignant reminder of aworld that might have been, had things gone differently in the early postwaryears.

owing the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the United States began to viewJapan as a potential threat to its political and economic interests in SoutheastAsia. A cataclysmic war between the two countries seemed inevitable, accordingto "Yellow Peril" fiction, and would likely begin with a surprise attack onHawaii. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which eventually led tothe Sino-Japanese War, sparked American moral condemnation as well as traderestrictions. In response, japan joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact,fully understanding that war was inevitable if its vision of a Pan-AsiaticEmpire was to be realized

ut Bowie, according to the film, becomes "fascinated" with theold mission, declares that he "would rather die in these ditches thanto give them up to the enemy," and refuses to destroy the fortress.Soon, Lieutenant Colonel William Barrett Travis and Bowie assumejoint command of the Alamo and are joined by David Crockett and hisdozen or so volunteers from Tennessee. There are about 150 men in theAlamo, few of whom are trained soldiers. The majority of these menare from outside Texas, with a number from European countries. "Theyhad come to aid the revolution." The only outside help the defendersreceive are thirty-two men from Gonzalez, Texas, who believed that"This was the place and this was the hour to stand opposed to tyranny."On 22 February "governed by the ruthless will of the dictator, SantaAnna's cavalry arrived" in Bexar, what is now San Antonio. Uponarriving, Santa Anna orders the men in the Alamo to surrender. Unwill-ing to do so, Travis answers with a canon shot aimed at the Mexicanforces. "One hundred fifty valiant volunteers against the dictator'strained brigades. The siege had begun."

This formidable group behaved, in the words of author Evan S. Connell, "less like a militaryreconnaissance than a summer excursion through the Catskills." According to surviving lettersand diaries, the men were bewitched by the Black Hills' beauty. These mountains, some of theoldest in North America, and their pine-filled valleys form a verdant oasis in the Great Plains. Inthe summer of 1874, crusty cavalrymen would lean from their horses to pluck bouquets ofwildflowers, and officers enjoyed champagne and wild gooseberries while the enlisted menplayed baseball. Custer expanded his natural history collection, loading a cart full of rare toads,petrified wood and rattlesnakes. "The air is serene and the sun is shining in all its glory," wroteLt. James Calhoun, one of Custer's officers, in his diary. "The birds are singing sweetly, warblingtheir sweet notes as they soar aloft. Nature seems to smile on our movement."

Oestmann paused to point out a rarely glimpsed view of George Washington's profile, gleamingin the morning light. Mount Rushmore has not looked so good in more than six decades. Thispast summer, the four presidents were given a high-tech face-lift; they were blasted with 150-degree water under with pressure. Sixty-four years' worth of dirt and lichens fell from thememorial. "Now the faces are whiter and a lot shinier," said Oestmann, who helped clean "aboutthree quarters of the first president. You see that dot in Washington's left eyelid?" He pointed toa broken drill bit stuck in the stone. "You could hardly see that before."

The presence of the Indian Memorial, wholeheartedly welcomed by theU.S. National Park Service and financed by the federal government, indeedimplicitly recognizes that the Lakota Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos in thevillage at the Little Bighorn acted with legitimacy and justice. Moreover, it isnot the only such recognition. Since 1999, the Park Service has erected mark-ers on the locations where individual Lakota and Cheyenne warriors died inthe battle—the Little Bighorn is one of the few battlefields in the world thatattempts to mark where individual soldiers perished—stating that the Indianwarrior died “while defending his homeland and the [Sioux or Cheyenne]way of life.” 4 But recognizing the legitimacy of the Native resistance, as Meanssuggests both the Indian Memorial and these markers do, sits uneasily nextto his earlier suggestion that Indians “put American first.” The Indians at theLittle Bighorn in 1876 were fighting against a forced unity that they fearedwould mean their cultural and political obliteration; they fought against theirincorporation into the United States on the terms that the United States hadnamed. In other words, to say that the Indian Memorial has “everything” todo with tribal sovereignty and the right of tribal nations to defend themselves(with a nod to Malcolm X) “by any means necessary” redefined the memorialin opposition to the official theme of both the dedication ceremonies and theIndian Memorial itself, a theme that Means explicitly endorsed in his borrowedtime at the speaker’s podium: “Peace through Unity.”

o begin, I want to pair two twenty-first-century examples that illus-trate the force of history at the Little Bighorn battlefield.

The Hemings siblings were installed as personal servants to Thomas and Martha, whichsuggests Martha’s level of comfort with her enslaved half-siblings. Robert Hemings, at age 12,replaced Jupiter Evans, aged 30, as Jefferson’s personal vale

Given the racial and status hierarchy in the United States, and Jefferson’s prominence, thereis no wonder that most of the focus on Hemings and Jefferson has been on Jefferson – howthe relationship ft, or did not ft, into his life.

The original draft of the Holiday Bill provided that the MemorialDay, July 4th, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving dates bechanged to the nearest Monday and that Washington’s Birthday be abol-ished and replaced by Presidents’ Day.

should be reburied according to the customs of Native American groups(Roark, 1989)

on Benito faltered; then, like some somnambulist suddenly interfered with, vacantly stared at his visitor,and ended by looking down on the deck

Always upon first boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially a foreign one, with a nondescriptcrew such as Lascars or Manilla men, the impression varies in a peculiar way from that produced by firstentering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land. B

But ere long Captain Delano bethought him that, indulgent as he was at the first, in judging the Spaniard,he might not, after all, have exercised charity enough

Battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancientturret, long ago taken by assault, and then left to decay.

The spars, ropes, and great part of the bulwarks, lookedwoolly, from long unacquaintance with the scraper, tar, and the brush. Her keel seemed laid, her ribs puttogether, and she launched, from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones

“SCAVENGERS, HYENA-LIKE,DESECRATE THE GRAVES OF THE DEAD PATRIOTS WE REVERE,”

Inprivileging “actual fact” over “narrative,” the governor, and many others, seem to proceed fromthe premise that history is a fixed thing; that somehow, long ago, the nation’s historiansidentified the relevant set of facts about our past, and it is the job of subsequent generations tosimply protect and disseminate them

But 1619 marks the earliest beginnings ofwhat would become this system.

Nikole has frequently turned to history to explain the present. Sometimes, reading adraft of one of her articles,

On Jan. 28, 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been a staff writer at The New York TimesMagazine since 2015, came to one of our weekly ideas meetings with a very big idea.

In June 1776, Tho

Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knewthat black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs,astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never betreated as such

that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776.

The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was anapartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts ofviolence.

My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story housewas perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in aperpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine.

The wind howled furiously,--the ocean was white with foam, which, onaccount of the darkness, we could see only by the quick flashes of lightning that darted occasionally from the angry sky. All wasalarm and confusion. Hideous cries came up from the slave women

You want to navigate this brig into a slave port, where you would have us all hanged; but you'll miss it; before this brig shalltouch a slave-cursed shore while I am on board, I will myself put a match to the magazine, and blow her, and be blown with her,into a thousand fragments.

I havecomplete command of this vessel.

a drop of blood from one on 'em will skeer a hundred

It is one thing tomanage a company of slaves on a Virginia plantation, and quite another thing to quell an insurrection on the lonely billows of theAtlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty. For the negro to act cowardly on shore, may be to act wisely; and I'vesome doubts whether you, Mr. Williams, would find it very convenient were you a slave in Algiers, to raise your hand against thebayonets of a whole government."

Ye made a mistake in yer manner of fighting 'em. All that is needed in dealingwith a set of rebellious darkies, is to show that yer not afraid of 'em

Frequently, these events emphasized AbrahamLincoln as a savior. Sometimes, this approach was born out of necessity as some, like blacks inRichmond, faced antagonistic white officials, who saw ema

The August 1st celebration of British emancipation became a counter celebration toIndependence Day across thirteen states and fifty-seven municipalities in the United S

Since the end of the slave trade in 1808 and the enactment of BritishEmancipation Act on August 1, 1834, which gradually emancipated enslaved peoples throughout theBritish Empire, memorializing the moment of emancipation had become a significant event.

Juneteenth, as a summerfestival, traditionally paired inspiring speeches and historical remembrances with fun summer activities,like baseball, parades, and picnicking

Indeed, a number of African American lead-ers and their political allies have emphasized action over w

Some of us need toseek out the facts of our past and our present, tell the story, pass it along, andhopefully, add our own part to it."

The event continues,paradoxically, to cleave the country, in both senses of the word-to divide aswell as to bind Americans.

Arizona became the focus of intensescrutiny and economic pressure, as boycotts organized against its tourist at-tractions and convention facilities expressed national displeasure with thestate's actions.

Until the South Carolina controversy-enveloped in a battle to remove ordefend the Confederate battle flag flying over the statehouse-the most con-spicuous conflict over the King holiday occurred in Arizona.

Utah sim-ilarly refused to recognize King by name, celebrating instead Human RightsDay beginning 1986, until Utah governor Mike Leavitt signed a bill in 2000 re-naming the January holiday.

A 1997 bill to add King's name to the annualevent failed in the New Hampshire House of Representatives by a 177-178 mar-gin, after it had passed the state senate.

By looking at how the Macy’s Day parade developed wewill see that parades in the form of marching fantasticals andragamuffins have long been a part of the tradition

A YMCA writer in 1892 explains the significanceof football on Thanksgiving Day as he tries to justify the lack ofchurch attendance as a result of it.

In 1889 a distinguished spokesmen forsports and Harvard geology professor, Nathaniel Shaler, announcedthat ‘‘football was coming to be seen as both a moral training groundand a mirror of American industrial capitalism.

Pierre Nora adds to Halbwachs’s understanding of the distinctionbetween collective memory and history with his volumes on theconstruction of French history

In contrast to early Christians, Halbwachs arguesthat today we have historical documentation to which we can referfor understanding the past.

with some ambiguity, "This is the only rock that doeshave a history that relates

After a couple ofhundred taps, he reached in and pulled seaweed out ofPlymouth Rock

The rock has become fairly round and has a diametervarying from five and a half to six and a half feet.

hat Munroe wanted was a piece of the rock. Hewanted to place a hand specimen in the hand of Henry S.Washington, petrologist, geologist, geochemist, of the Car-negie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory.

What

Dorothy Bradford was an apparent su-icide

Yet Eastern Europe-both in its days of spatial inflexibility andits more recent days of flux-is a reveal-ing example of how space has failed tocontain the leakage of contesting memo-ries within its terrain.

Similarly, consider-ations of outer space have provided· aterritory on which to map out our projec-tions of power and authority (

One element that contemporarymemory studies have clearly taught us isthe unpredictability of collective memory.

The most common transformation ofmemory concerns what has been re-garded generally as memory undone-amnesia or forgetting.

To remember is defined as the abilityto recount something that happened inthe past

The pion~er symbol, regardless of the extent it served !~e interests ?fthe nation, originated in the attempts of local corr_im~ruties ~nd ethmcenclaves to mark their communal origins

Public commemorations usually celebrate official concerns more'than vernacular ones

One implic~tion of t~e argument that the abundant patriotic mes-sages of Amencan pubhc memory are rooted partially in the quest forpower by leaders of various sorts is that patriotism is invented as afo~m. of social control

They acknowledge the ideal of loyalty in com-memorative events and agree to defend the symbol of the nation but, often use commemoration to redefine that symbol or ignore it for thei sake of leisure or economic ends

The term "ordinary people" best describes the rest of society that1 participates in public commemoration and protects vernacular inter-ests.