Marked Unmarked Remembered: A Geography of American Memory

About this book

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 nations 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.