Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory: Marked, Unmarked

by Andrew Lichtenstein, Alex Lichtenstein, Edward T. Linenthal (Foreword)

From Wounded Knee to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster to the Trail of Tears, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered presents photographs of significant sites from US history, posing unsettling questions about the contested memory of traumatic episodes from the nation’s past. Focusing especially on landscapes related to African American, Native American, and labor history, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered reveals new vistas of officially commemorated sites, sites that are neglected or obscured, and sites that serve as a gathering place for active rituals of organized memory.


These powerful photographs by award-winning photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein are interspersed with short essays by some of the leading historians of the United States. The book is introduced with substantive meditations on meaning and landscape by Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, and Edward T. Linenthal, former editor of the Journal of American History. Individually, these images convey American history in new and sometimes startling ways. Taken as a whole, the volume amounts to a starkly visual reckoning with the challenges of commemorating a violent and conflictual history of subjugation and resistance that we forget at our peril.
 

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Photography, Historical, Art

180 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2017

Reviews

[Aidan Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was basically James Loewen's Lies Across America but with photos, and that's the highest compliment! It was divided into the three sections of the title. I was appalled by some of the things that remained unmarked-I knew about Deer Island in Massachusetts, which served as a concentration camp for "Praying Indians" during King Phillip's War, the site of the death of Karen Silkwood, a Kerr-McGee employee who died in an unexplained car crash while delivering incriminating documents on her employer to a journalist, and the unsolved lynching of Frank Little, an IWW labor leader who was lynched in Butte, Montana while campaigning against World War One, but did not know about how the town of Charleston, Tennessee which served as a concentration camp for Cherokees about to be deported on the Trail of Tears. Disgustingly, none of these places are marked. My spirits were greatly lifted, though, by the creative ways some historical atrocities are remembered. The St. Paul Community Baptist Church, a black church in East New York, Brooklyn, holds a ceremony in which congregants, dressed all in white, mourn those Africans who perished in the Middle Passage on a beach in Rockaway, Queens. Every year on Juneteenth in Galveston, Texas a reenactor reads the declaration which declared slaves in Texas to be free. Every year in Brackettsville, Texas a reunion is held of the descendants of the Black Seminole Scouts, darker-skinned mixtures of African and Seminole ancestry who fled to Mexico in the 19th century from Indian Territory to escape slave traders. At the cemetery of the Carlisle Indian School, a "civilizing" boarding school for Native American children where they were stripped of their traditions and many died of disease, their descendants leave mementos at their headstones. In Mankato, Minnesota, young Dakota men and their supporters ride from South Dakota to the town every winter to reenact the journey of thirty eight of their ancestors who were hanged in 1862-but in the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. These are just some of the many events, past and present, described in this book-both by photographs and writing. They convey the beauty, horror, pain, passion, drama, and conflict of history-elements of history which school textbooks are woefully incapable of conveying. Kids and teenagers need many more history teachers like Andrew and Alex Lichtenstein!

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed editing and reading this book--it's heavy on photographs but makes a very cogent point on places that are marked and remembered versus the places that are forgotten and left to the dust despite important historical moments happening at these places.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, thought-provoking, and an important visual meditation on how we remember, don't remember, and often, choose to forget.