ABSTRACT
In this Afterword, the author draws on commemorations at American battlefields to discuss the importance of viewing the changing messages of such displays through time. Commemorations of a key site of the American Revolution were originally very hostile to Britain but slowly lessened this hatred over the next 150 years, and after World War II refer to Britain as a ‘kindred nation’ with which the USA is long at peace. Similarly, the monuments and celebrations at the key Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg were hostile to the Confederate dead and veterans for half a century, but now are seen as representing reconciliation. Finally, drawing on the nearly universal application to the 9/11 sites of Abraham Lincoln’s trope of the Gettysburg battlefield as being ‘hallowed ground’, the author discusses the ‘secular sacredness’ of battlefields, in which the remains of those killed at the place are generally felt to consecrate a site, without necessarily reference to any religion.
