Description
Are Sesquicentennial News Stories and Commemorations Vestiges of Public Memory or Symbols of True Progress? In recent years, research on public memory has gathered force in scholarly camps of sociology, ethnography, history, journalism, communication, and psychology. Public memory, especially what society chooses to remember and what it chooses to forget is also spawning quantities of literature dedicated to traumatic events, such as the Holocaust and the Civil War. This research includes two components. Primary research for the first part focuses on newspaper stories and especially series that elucidate the history of the Civil War as the country moved through the 150th anniversary of that event. Virginia's largest newspapers are analyzed using a structural analysis methodology derived from literature and adapted to incorporate the format of newspaper stories. Such stories will be compared to 19th-century coverage of the same events. The second half focuses on festivals, living history sites, and commemorations as public memory offerings. Summer 2011
