ABSTRACT
Memory studies emerged as a distinctive category of analysis for historians in the 1990s. Historians, joined by scholars from other disciplines, including art history, literary studies, and women's studies, began to examine how societies forged a remembrance of the past. Literature, motion pictures, public art, holidays, and museum exhibits all served to forge memories of the past that would often be deemed as mythic. This chapter focuses on the literature concerning cemeteries, monuments, and veterans and hereditary organizations. Although there is a complex and burgeoning body of scholarship on the memory of the Civil War that uses gender as a category of analysis, this is the exception regarding memory studies and war. For instance, scholars have not given the wave of hereditary societies that emerged during the Gilded Age, such as the DAR, the attention they are due, especially given their overt efforts to create a unique gendered role for women to promote the memory of war.
