This work was sponsored by the University of Richmond, School of Arts & Sciences, Department of History.

In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack in the United States, many people have proposed memorials to mark the site of the tragedy, especially at the World Trade Center. Why does the American public feel the need to commemorate sacrifice, and why is there a debate over the proper form of public memory? This tutorial will explore these questions and will put the current debate in the context of a long tradition of public memorials in America.

In the post-September 11 United States, public memory has taken on heightened social importance. Plans for several September 11 memorials are well under way, and the public recollection and commemoration of the events of September 11 have taken on a large role in American political discourse. Why does the American public feel the need to commemorate sacrifice, and why is there a debate over the proper form of public memory?

Race thinking dominates ways in which people in the United States differentiate groups of people from each other. This tutorial focuses on associations between color and culture in order to examine how racial meanings are constructed and made comprehensible as well as how they are routed through representations of class. Using a combination of texts -- academic articles, films, newspapers and advertisements -- we will explore representations of "whiteness," blackness," and other "race-d" identities in the public arena.

The purpose of this tutorial is to sharpen your sense of the ways in which history is constructed, educate you about the standards governing that construction, and develop your own skills for engaging in such construction. We will use the story of the Pullman strike to develop reading, research, and writing strategies and to ponder the multiple choices every historian must make in writing a narrative that both recounts and analyzes a historical event. So this is a course in skill-building, story-telling, and scholarly ethics.