ABSTRACT
In Chapter 11, we consider what happens when death becomes public, when memory moves to the communal level within which meaning in death constructs ideas of nationalist identity. We recall visits we’ve made to national monuments, memorials, and other cultural sites of commemoration and loss in and around our nation’s capital; i.e., the Holocaust Museum; the Martin Luther King Memorial; the World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War Memorials; Arlington National Cemetery; and the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial. We discuss how these monuments, memorials, and museums transmit the cultural values of what is worth dying for as they represent national mythographies of sacrifice, and move us from an individualized view of death – a view tinted by grief, loss, meaninglessness, and lack of agency – into heroic acts that bound the dead and the grieving with the rest of society.
