UConn History Professor Micki McElya presents her new book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery
at the UConn Barnes & Noble at Storrs Center on Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 5:30 p.m.
Arlington National Cemetery is America’s most sacred shrine, a destination for four million visitors who each year tour its grounds and honor those buried there. For many, Arlington’s symbolic importance places it beyond politics. Yet as Micki McElya shows, no site in the United States plays a more political role in shaping national identity.
Arlington commemorates sacrifices made in the nation’s wars and armed conflicts. Yet it has always been a place of struggle over the boundaries of citizenship and the meaning of honor and love of country. A plantation built by slave labor overlooking Washington, D.C., Arlington was occupied by Union f…orces early in the Civil War. A portion was designated a federal cemetery in 1864. A camp for the formerly enslaved, Freedman’s Village, had already been established there in 1863, and remained for three decades.
The cemetery was seen primarily as a memorial to the white Civil War dead until its most famous monument was erected in 1921: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, symbolizing universal military sacrifice through the interment of a single World War I Unknown. As a century of wars abroad secured Arlington’s centrality in the American imagination and more Unknowns joined the first at the tomb, inclusion within its gates became a prerequisite for broader claims to national belonging. In revealing how Arlington encompasses the most inspiring and the most shameful aspects of American history, McElya enriches the story of this landscape, demonstrating that remembering the past and reckoning with it must go hand in hand.
Micki McElya is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.
For more information, contact: UConn Bookstore at 860-486-8525
http://dailydigest.uconn.edu/publicEmailSingleStoryView.php?id=62892&cid=24&iid=2046
Alexis L. Boylan, Associate Professor, (Art & Art History and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies).
The remarkable preservation of the Early Bronze Age village of Afragola on the Campania Plain of Southern Italy is unmatched in Europe. The site was buried under nearly a meter of volcanic ash deposited by the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius ca. 3945+10 cal. BP. The site boasts a large number of well-preserved structures, built features and organic materials and thus provides a laboratory-type setting in which to investigate variability in artifact distribution and activity areas across a single village. This research utilizes micromorphological analysis of thin sections of undisturbed sediment collected at the site to understand how people used living spaces, organized daily activities and, when possible, to connect village life to broad issues related to the emergence of social complexity on the Campanian Plain. In particular, micromorphology is used to identify the type and range of human activities, the function of features and buildings, and the intensity of site occupation. The micromorphological analysis at Afragola provides a unique example of a briefly occupied agricultural village with what appears to be minimally stratified social organization during the Early Bronze Age of southern Italy.
