American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory by Matthew Dennis (review)

Reviewed by: American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory by Matthew Dennis Seth C. Bruggeman (bio) Keywords Relics, Public history, Museums American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory. By Matthew Dennis. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2023. Pp. 436. Paper, 32. 95. ) Matthew Dennis is concerned that scholars have, as he puts it, "largely neglected American relics" (xvi), and so he has set out in this engaging new book to make amends. It's not an easy task. Just defining what a relic is ends up being a real chore. Dennis settles on a notion borrowed from End Page 150 Jules Prown's timeworn assertion that the only actual encounters we can have with the past are through old objects. American relics then, for Dennis's purposes, are those things that are particularly effective at bridging past and present, and that somehow persist in shaping our collective expectations of life in America. It's a wide net for sure, and in these pages—which begin in the early republic, but extend well into the recent past—readers will discover relics up to all manner of hijinks. They speak to us, they ignite memory, they distribute authority, they wax, they wane. Dennis wants us to know that this isn't just whimsy. His point, as I see it, is to insist that we historians must attend to relics if we really want to understand how power has always worked in the United States. And so, to do it, Dennis takes us on a wide-ranging tour through eight chapters thematically organized around moments, places, and events where relics have shifted the course of American history. Some of these are eminently familiar. Charles Willson Peale and his mastodon, for instance, figure prominently early on and create useful opportunities for Dennis to reflect on how fraught objects, including human remains, have shaped conversations about nation and empire. George Washington is here too, of course, as is Lafayette, who Dennis figures as a living relic. Some of this recalls books by folks like Karal Ann Marling and Barry Schwartz, scholars who typified an earlier wave of fascination with American object reverence. Dennis, however, is more interested in politics, how for instance the Tammany Society deployed relics against the cult of Washington. In this way and in his method, which is much more firmly grounded in print sources than in object analysis, Dennis more clearly aligns with early work by David Waldstreicher and, as regards living relics, Al Young's famous riff on George Robert Twelves Hewes. It's in the book's beefy middle section, titled "Supremacy, " where Dennis digs deepest into the archive and, incidentally, where readers will find the freshest material. A chapter on relics and westward expansion usefully wonders what white pioneers did with the bodies of all those people who died on the trail. By mining the diaries of overland travelers bound for California and Oregon, Dennis shows how white Americans strategically buried dead bodies wherever they might exert greatest mnemonic advantage in the conquest of western territory and the dispossession of Native people. Dennis is keen to point out how, in this regard, American relics conveyed white power in the nineteenth-century West just as saints' relics conveyed church power across medieval Europe. It's a bone he picks with Teresa Barnett, whose own history of numinous objects in End Page 151 nineteenth-century America insists that conflating new and old relics is folly. My work too joins in this slow-burn debate so, for our purposes here, I'll leave it to readers to sort out where they stand. What I think we can all agree on is that centering the relic allows historians to show why worrying about the past matters now. In the case of dead white bodies out west, Dennis shows us how those particular relics functioned over time to erase, silence, or delegitimize relics valued by people who contest American power. He makes the point with a fascinating story about how a meteorite sacred to the Clackamas people ended up fragmented and on display at the American Museum of Natural History. In the book's most developed chapter, Dennis goes deep on. . .