ABSTRACT
To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the uses of public memory in foreign relations, Allison Wanger investigates the historical roots and commemorative heritage of the U.S.’s eight WWI and fourteen WWII overseas military cemeteries. The U.S. federal government had a dual purpose in developing burial grounds abroad; it sought to honor fallen soldiers and to erect transnationally-legible memorial expressions of the nation’s expanding international power. To fulfill these objectives, the U.S. War Department and Congress had to mediate divergent political interests, alongside diverse vernacular memorialization traditions. By tracing and investigating these oftentimes-contentious domestic and international negotiations, Wanger explores how, why, and to what effect the U.S. federal government eternally enlisted the wars’ dead as ambassadors for American democracy. Through an examination of the Cold War and post-Cold War memorial afterlives of the cemeteries, she elucidates how geopolitics have impacted the U.S. federal government’s investment in creating a socially and politically useful public memory of patriotic sacrifice. Ultimately, the chapter reveals that by carving the memory of the U.S.’s participation in WWI and WWII into European landscapes, the U.S. federal government established memorial foundations and international pilgrimage sites for subsequent generations to reaffirm and reimagine evolving transatlantic relations.
