Sacred Ground

Americans have persistently expressed fascination with the nation's mostfamous battlefields through patriotic rhetoric, monument building, physicalpreservation, and battle reenactment. But each site is also a place wheredifferent groups of Americans come to compete for ownership of cherishednational stories and to argue about the meaning of war, the importanceof martial sacrifice, and the significance of preserving the nation'spatriotic landscape.From the anniversary speeches at Lexington and Concord that shaped theimage of the minuteman to Alamo Day speeches invoking the Texas "freedomfighters" of 1836 in support of the contras in Nicaragua; from passionatearguments over the placement of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg toconfrontations between militant American Indian Movement and "Custerloyalists" during the Little Bighorn centennial in 1976; from thetreatment of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor to continuing attemptsto maintain the purity of these places in the face of commercialization---Sacred Ground details the ongoing struggles to define, control, and subvertpatriotic faith as expressed at these ceremonial sites.