War Memorials

WAR MEMORIALS

WAR MEMORIALS. The American national identity remains inexorably intertwined with the commemoration and memory of past wars. Most earlier war memorials sparked as much controversy over their purpose

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and cost as later ones such as the Vietnam Veterans (1982) and World War II (construction began in 2002). Monument styles changed dramatically over two hundred years. Before the Civil War, simple stone shafts predominated, including the Bunker Hill Monument (1842) and the mass gravestone at the Mexican War cemetery in Mexico City (1851). After the Civil War, European-trained sculptors created beaux-arts edifices and statues at battlefield parks like the ones at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. The late-nineteenth-century City Beautiful movement convinced city governments to purchase elaborate war monuments, such as the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis, Indiana (1902). Most of the twentieth century saw "useful" memorials such as the stadium at Soldier Field in Chicago (1925), where Gold Star Mothers talked City Hall into changing the name from Grant Park Municipal Stadium. A B-17 Flying Fortress bomber airplane named The Memphis Belle, residing in Memphis, Tennessee, since 1946, helped to popularize preserved military equipment. The American Battle Monuments Commission, established in 1923, oversees twenty-seven monuments worldwide commemorating twentieth-century American wars.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mayo, James M. War Memorials As Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond. New York: Praeger, 1988.

Piehler, G. Kurt. Remembering War the American Way. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

Bill Olbrich

See also Vietnam War Memorial .