The construction and deconstruction of history through objects

This week's readings readings focused on how object and objects representation can construct and deconstruct national concepts of past events. In Ken Yellis's article Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars, delves into various museum exhibitions that challenged audiences perception of historic objects and he narratives they tell. For instance, Fred Wilson deconstructed time and narrative through his exhibit Mining the Museum where he let the objects speak to him to creat an exhibit that touch upon Word and broke our linear concept of time by letting past, present and future memories of the past compete with one another. Through Yellis's insights we are left with the understanding that audiences are torn, with a large section eager to understand those aspects of history that we as a group have actively ignored or forgotten and the other angered with a narrative that breaks from the nationalistic historical narrative that museums have perpetrated for decades. [1] What this article touches on is the important role that museums and curated images and objects have in the shaping of historical understanding within a nation, ultimately linking these institutions with the task of reshaping a nation after extreme trauma such as war or epidemic. In following this theme and delving deeper into this concept is Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves:Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-century America. Savage deconstructs the ways in which the United States used imagery and monuments to rebuild a nation, and national history after the conclusion of the American Civil War. He identifies and defines the many types of national monuments that strove to exemplify this new freedom within a broken nation, while other stood to solidify the divisions that were created before and during the Civil War. [2] 

The Themes touched upon in these pieces, both publish in the late 1990s and early 2000s are still relevant today, if not more so. The national is still divided in how they want to remember the America of the past, and this is evident in the on going national debate over the representation of confederate imagery on government and public spaces. Debates such as these will not be solved quickly, but it does shed light onto the power of images and objects to evoke powerful memories and constructed memories. It also proves the ways in which a nation recovers after a wide spread traumatic event, and how these events are remembered to encourage repair and unity. As I continue in the public history sphere I hope to better understand how these objects can be used to encourage remembrance of the histories our nation has chosen to forget or ignore, while limited the instigation of anger and fear from an audience who may not want to recall these events.