My Dissertation Abstract

Dissertation Title: “The National Way of Death: Funerals, Gravesites, and Monuments in American Public Culture from the Gilded Aged to the Great Depression.”

In recent years, scholars have emphasized the importance of collective memory in the making of national identity. Where does death fit into the memory of the United States, particularly in the economic and social chaos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did death shape the collective memory of American national identity in the midst of a pluralism brought on by immigration, civil and labor rights, and a transforming culture? On the one hand, the commemorations of public figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt constructed an identity based on Anglo-Saxonism, American imperialism, and the “Strenuous Life.” This was reflected in the burial of American soldiers of the Spanish American and Philippine American wars and the First World War. On the other hand, the commemoration of Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and of lynching created opportunities to both critique and appropriate definitions of national identity. Through a series of case studies, my dissertation brings together cultural and political history to explore the (re)production and (trans)formation of American identity from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression. I am particularly interested in the way people used funerals and monuments as tools to produce official and vernacular memory. I argue that both official and subaltern forms of commemoration can help historians understand the social and political tensions of creating national identity in a burgeoning industrial and multicultural society.