ABSTRACT
The American memorial landscape reflects an ongoing contestation between public and private visualization of memory. Prior to the Civil War, commemorations of the dead were primarily limited to private burial sites. After the Civil War, a national memorial landscape was created by the construction of national cemeteries, town square memorials, and numerous Federal and Confederate memorials in public space. The wave of Civil War commemoration in public space continued through the 1920s. The national memorial landscape then remained essentially unchanged for the next fifty years as commemorative activity was decentralized to local communities. Another wave of nationalized commemoration was triggered in the 1970s by demands for public commemoration of members of the military who were lost in the Vietnam and Korean military conflicts. There was however an evolving disconnection between contemporary global conflict and the nationalized commemorative representation. During the last half of the twentieth century in Western civilization, international and intra-national conflict began to be focused upon civilian targets instead of the military and/or political entities of declared (or undeclared) wars. The first U.S. aircraft was hijacked in 1961. Munich became the site of two terrorist attacks in the early 1970s: the bombing of its airport in 1970 and the attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Airports and airplanes continued to be primary terrorist targets: the Rome airport was bombed in 1973; an Air France airplane was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1976. Although
