Gettysburg 1963 and Contesting Commemoration

Commemoration often sees chronology become an agent in itself.Monuments are erected, pageants are organized, and people celebrate, simply because a certain amount of time has passed.This ritualistic behaviour and collective investment in timekeeping offer cultural security and imply future action according to the count of past years.In Titus's Gettysburg 1963 and Noe's Contesting Commemoration, such temporal operations are central, yet neither makes a case for the mindless observation of anniversaries or rote recital of ideals.Instead, these two engaging books offer important case studies of the way nineteenth-and twentieth-century Americans made conscious use of the past for political purposes in the present.For Titus, Gettysburg in 1963 takes centre stage in the country's centennial celebrations of the Civil War.The book offers an in-depth exploration into the ways the contemporary contexts of the Cold War and the civil rights movement profoundly shaped the commemorative events that took place in "America's most famous small town."From carefully crafted speeches, new buildings and monuments, to living-history "vignettes," Titus assembles a range of different media to provide a compelling account of what the Civil War battle and battlefield meant to Americans in the mid-twentieth century.In the process, she identifies three critical narratives that emerged over the course of the celebrations.The first advanced a states' rights, "Lost Cause" interpretation of the war and was used in defence of