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This chapter examines the roles played by public history and historical memory in the reconstruction of the Cherokee Nation in twentieth-century Oklahoma. The United States dismantled the Cherokee political system at the turn of the twentieth century, when it forced Cherokees to accept the allotment policy. By the middle twentieth century, however, Cherokees began to reestablish a tribal administration, creating new institutions to represent and provide services to Cherokee communities. The memory of the nineteenth-century Cherokee Nation contributed to these developments in several ways. Tribal leaders invoked their people's nineteenth-century achievements to promote political cooperation in the present. They also used the memory of the Indian republic to bolster their own legitimacy as tribal representatives, offering themselves as heirs to the leaders of the old Nation. They depicted their work as an effort to restore the Cherokees' nineteenth-century greatness, applying tribal history to the task of building a modern Cherokee Nation.

Oxana Shevel takes up the theme of historical memory as a central component of Ukrainian identity. Conceptions of history have become pivotal in understanding what it means to be Ukrainian, and in particular the nature of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Shevel seeks to explain why these issues have become so polarized and what paths might be open to handling the politics of memory in a way that is less divisive. She sees potential in the fact that a significant minority of survey respondents favors a pluralism in which individuals are free to maintain different interpretations of historical events. She examines Spain’s successful efforts to overcome the divides in that country as a possible positive model for Ukraine.

The Introduction lays out the central sources, themes, questions, and methods utilized in this microhistory of Elizabeth Isham. With the ‘Booke of Remembrance’ as the foundational source of the book, it is juxtaposed with the Isham papers that exist in the Northamptonshire Record Office. This juxtaposition underscores the value of Elizabeth’s autobiography in exploring life-writing, patriarchy, family history, never-married women, gender ideals, reading, and confessional identity, and religious beliefs in the seventeenth century. Moreover, the archival custody of the autobiography highlights the influence of patriarchy over the historical memory of women, especially those who never wed in their lives. Overall, the introduction stresses that an exploration of Elizabeth Isham’s life and world allows us to think about patriarchy, piety, and singlehood in fresh and new ways, expanding our understanding of early modern England.

For several decades, Yanhuang Chunqiu (Annals of the Yellow Emperor) enjoyed a unique status among Chinese publications as a monthly magazine that was both the publication of a state-owned unit and the journal of a private association managed by a team of independent editors. It made a strong contribution to furthering public discussion of early PRC history through special columns like “Controversies” and “Confessions.” This chapter analyzes the journal’s strategy in negotiating a space of relative autonomy with the institutions of state censorship, before it was ultimately reorganized by the state in 2016.

This chapter draws on texts by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to establish the framework of the book as a whole. For both Arendt and Benjamin, the narrative form is the predominant expression of historical memory, and this chapter emphasizes how both thinkers articulate its relation to the finitude of human experience by virtue of its having a beginning, middle, and an end. While Arendt argues that this structure has been lost in the open-endedness of modern conceptions of progress and Benjamin suggests that its loss has contributed to the demise of storytelling as individual remembrance, the latter nonetheless suggests that something of human finitude has been retained in modernity, even within its commitment to never-ending progress. In the course of the exploration, the chapter argues that this structure of open-endedness can provide a resource for theorizing historical narratives in terms of their withheld endings, or as an experience of reading about the past that is charged with a future-oriented suspense. It pursues this jarring experience of reading the past as one which has the potential to suspend or interrupt a straight-forward conception of linear time.

In the 1920s and 30s, tourism in southern Appalachia created a new public awareness of the region's Cherokee history. With the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), the Cherokee community in Western North Carolina became a significant tourist destination, and this development encouraged promoters to work the Cherokees more thoroughly into their conceptions of the region's past. Tourist literature and performances began to highlight certain Cherokee historical episodes, among them the story of removal. This chapter traces the Cherokee community's growing involvement in the regional tourism economy during the interwar period, while examining mountain tourism's representations of Cherokee history. It describes the roles played by Cherokee history in promotions for the GSMNP, before closely analysing two particular commemorations: a campaign in Knoxville, Tennessee, to erect a monument to Cherokee removal and a pageant mounted by the Eastern Band of Cherokees to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the tribe's removal treaty.

In 1938 civic and business leaders in Chattanooga organized an elaborate festival to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga and the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of their city. While planning the festival, they added a third anniversary, the centennial of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. The festival became the period's single largest commemoration of Indian removal. This chapter explores the Chattanooga event as a particularly vivid example of the emergence of the Cherokee removal story within southern public memory in the interwar period. It traces the evolution of the removal centennial from a minor addendum to an elaborate program, arguing that the event helped to establish Cherokee history as a prominent element of this non-Indian city's public identity. It also describes Cherokee participation in the festival. Cherokees played several important roles in the centennial, but those roles were defined and closely scripted by local organizers. The chapter also explores relationships between the removal memory and more traditional commemorative themes, like the honoring of the Civil War dead and the celebration of community progress.

In the early 1980s, the National Park Service began exploring the idea of creating a national trail dedicated to Cherokee removal. The planning and designation of this national trail became a catalyst for a variety of public history projects across the South. While the Park Service, itself, devoted scant resources to the initiative, the national trail became a framework in which local groups of commemorators pursued dozens of public history ideas. This final chapter describes the creation of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, paying particular attention to the ways in which the federal project influenced public memory in local communities. The national trail idea led local commemorators to emphasize their communities' Cherokee history, even when that Cherokee history was quite negligible. This chapter examines the expansion of removal commemoration since the 1980s as an expression of a contemporary American obsession with issues of history and memory. It also places the national trail in the context of recent "history wars," public debates over the interpretation of the American past.

This chapter explores how internal and external tensions influencing Ebony’s depiction of black history fed into the struggle to establish a national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1970s and 1980s. Against this backdrop, Bennett and other Ebony contributors struggled to negotiate the continued importance of the magazine’s black history content in a changing cultural and political climate. For some, the King Holiday represented an opportunity to reflect on the activist’s legacy as a ‘hero to be remembered.’ For others, it was a chance to reiterate the political application of the black past and its role in the ongoing struggle for black liberation.

In 1950, the outdoor drama Unto These Hills debuted in Cherokee, North Carolina. The play, which became one of the most popular tourism attractions in southern Appalachia, depicted Cherokee history from the time of European contact through the mid-nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the Cherokee struggle against removal. This chapter examines Unto These Hills as an example of Cold War American culture, while placing the drama in the context of the termination policy, the federal government's campaign to remove the trust status of Indian lands and withdraw special federal services to Native American communities. While the memory of removal broadcast in Unto These Hills echoed some of the language of the termination campaign, it ultimately helped the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians avoid termination.

Chapter 3 looks at Guillermo del Toro’s horror trilogy Cronos, El espinazo del diablo and El laberinto del fauno. Using the frameworks of feminism, Marx and Freud it explores how horror and horrific tropes function in these films on a political level to address particular issues relevant to Mexico (the impact of NAFTA) and Spain (the recovery of historical memory of Spanish Civil War repression). It traces how these three films respond to and reproduce a shared Hispanic imaginary, history and politics by adapting and adopting Hollywood horror conventions as these have been read in political terms by Robin Wood (1985), Tanya Modleski (1999) and Barbara Creed (1999). Ultimately, it suggests that Cronos, El espinazo del diablo and El laberinto del fauno (Crimson Peak is analysed in the Epilogue) speak not only to local/national issues but also to transatlantic political concerns enabled by the progressive discourse at the heart of horror cinema.