![]() ![]() The fact that the USS Arizona memorial is a burial place ensures that remembrance there will always to some degree be predicated on narratives of death and sacrifice, inscribed in a memorial wall of names and personalized in the stories of medal recipients. If changes at the national Pearl Harbor memorial in Hawai‘i are any indication, the 75 th anniversary will reflect an ongoing shift away from a historiography centered only on the stories of American combatants to a broader canvas of conflicts that also includes homeland sacrifices and injustices as well as the perspectives of former enemies and themes of reconciliation. While Pearl Harbor will always be a place where martial narratives of heroism and sacrifice find a prominent stage, the current moment suggests a greater tolerance for less narrowly patriotic analyses of the politics and conduct of the war. What might this mean for commemoration of the Pearl Harbor 75 th? The most visible change, it seems, is not so much a move away from storytelling as an expansion of the range of stories deemed relevant for commemoration. Most recently the death of Raymond Haerry, one of only six remaining survivors from the battleship USS Arizona, made national news.Īlthough it is foolish to set the words ‘memory’ and ‘history’ in opposition to one another, the end of the era of first-person witnessing for World War II, so often discussed in the literature on the Holocaust, sees history supplanting (and appropriating) memory, at least if we think of the latter as rooted in spoken narrative. ![]() Yes, a handful of veterans will attend ceremonies at Pearl Harbor, but stories appearing during the run-up to the anniversary focus as much on the passing of survivors as on their stories. If 50 th anniversaries of war tend to be the last grand occasion in which the war generation’s veterans and survivors commemorate their war, what do 75 th anniversaries do? And for whom? Whereas the 50 th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1991 ushered in a period of national commemorations featuring veterans billed as the Greatest Generation who fought America’s Good War, what will the 75 th anniversary feature?įor Americans born after the war the 75 th anniversary on December 7th marks the turn toward an era of post-witness remembrance. ![]()
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