I began work on this book during a faculty fellowship leave granted by my employer, Ohio University. I am grateful for the support of my colleagues in the School of Communication Studies and Scripps College of Communication as they endorsed my leave request. I also thank my family for their encouragement, especially my wife, Christina Beck, who shared her wisdom as an experienced book editor.

The view down the National Mall from the steps of the stately U.S. Capitol is simply stunning. Nearly two miles distant sits the other anchor of America’s “Grand...

The National Mall has hosted countless protest events and other gatherings, many of which are recounted in the context of this volume. As a site of national significance, the Mall provides a symbolic destination for political argument. Encompassing the steps of the Capitol, White House, and Supreme Court, along with many memorials and museums, the Mall has served as a rhetorical Mecca of sorts,...

In its “Foundation Statement,” the National Park Service states that the purposes of the National Mall...

In the late afternoon of July 28, 1932, some 400 infantry, over 200 mounted cavalry, and five tanks of the U.S. Army moved out from their quarters at Fort Myer and Fort Washington to gather on the Ellipse of the White House....

In the Introduction to this book, Roger Aden argues that “ghosts of public commemoration” haunt the National Mall, creating an absent presence of memories that have been obfuscated by or hidden within the landscape yet still retain a place within the history of our nation. The civil rights movement, which defined one of the most tumultuous periods of the American past, created many of...

When Tom and Sarah Williams of Louisville, Kentucky made the pilgrimage to the National Mall in Washington, DC during the autumn of 1997, they, like millions of other visitors, searched in vain for a marker commemorating the location of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. In a poignant, one-page letter to Representative Anne Northup, Williams argued that...

In a capital city that proclaims innumerable memorial narratives via its monuments to its nation, the story of African Americans is increasingly being told. For example, a block from the White House the Decatur House is working to renovate its historic building that is (perhaps) the only remaining slave quarters in the District, so it can include enslaved people’s stories in its tale.

The story of the Portrait Monument was one of incredibly lofty ideals encountering misunderstandings and resistance that began with the monument’s...

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), located at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place in Washington, DC is intended to be an example of what Kendall Phillips, G. Mitchell Reyes and others call “global memoryscapes.”1~1. Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes, Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011). Those who study these memoryscapes oftentimes invite researchers to pay attention to the ways that particular commemorative objects, rhetorical histories, or other shards of complex memory are assembled and deployed in a host of translational networks of remembering and forgetting. Note, for example, the diverse ways that cosmopolitan citizens of the world, who share common interests in preserving memories of the Shoah, nevertheless see very different parts of the memoryscapes and representations of the Judeocide presented in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Israel’s Yad Vashem...

It is strikingly peculiar that James Garfield has been memorialized four times in the nation’s capital. I have not conducted an official count, but only Abraham Lincoln seems to exceed Garfield. Lincoln has a grand memorial on the Mall, a park east of the Capitol, a statue as emancipator in that park, and two sites connected to his assassination—Ford’s Theatre where he was shot...

The National Gallery of Art occupies an important place in the collective American psyche. Since it opened in 1941, nearly 300 million people have visited.1~1. Phillip Kopper and the Publishing Office of the National Gallery...

The moniker “National...

Roger C. Aden is Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. His research integrates rhetorical and qualitative methods of research to examine the meanings of places as they are rhetorically constructed and interpreted. He is the editor of U.S. Public Memory, Rhetoric, Nationhood, and the National Mall and author of Childhood...

Derek H. Alderman is professor of geography at the University of Tennessee and past president (2017–2018) of the American Association of Geographers. His work examines the role of the landscape in the politics of remembering (and forgetting) African American heritage. He coauthored (with Owen Dwyer) the award-winning book Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory....

This series provides thought-provoking and accessible analyses of the uses of language and media from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. In particular, this series examines how modern discourse is constructed and communicated in our distracted times, focusing on specific settings such as health communication, crisis communication, changing norms of interpersonal exchange,...