From Wounded Knee to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster to the Trail of Tears, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered presents photographs of significant sites from US history, posing unsettling questions about the contested memory of traumatic episodes from the nation’s past. Focusing especially on landscapes related to African American, Native American, and labor history, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered reveals new vistas of officially commemorated sites, sites that are neglected or obscured, and sites that serve as a gathering place for active rituals of organized memory.


These powerful photographs by award-winning photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein are interspersed with short essays by some of the leading historians of the United States. The book is introduced with substantive meditations on meaning and landscape by Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, and Edward T. Linenthal, former editor of the Journal of American History. Individually, these images convey American history in new and sometimes startling ways. Taken as a whole, the volume amounts to a starkly visual reckoning with the challenges of commemorating a violent and conflictual history of subjugation and resistance that we forget at our peril.
 

Alex Lichtenstein, current editor of the American Historical Review, is a professor of history at Indiana University. The author of many articles on labor, prison, and civil rights history, his previous work on photography is Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid.
 
Andrew Lichtenstein is a photographer, journalist, and educator from Brooklyn, New York. His first book Never Coming Home was published in 2007.
 

"Andrew Lichtenstein sees history all around, even when it’s not evident at first glance. A pastoral, sun-drenched Mississippi cotton field turns out to be where Emmett Till was murdered. A tranquil suburban subdivision was the site of untold suffering in 1838, when Cherokee Indians had to endure a brutal winter as the government forced them westward on the Trail of Tears. He admits that making pictures of seemingly-ordinary places where tragedy, conflict or rebellion took place isn’t easy. But as has been seen in recent weeks, there has been a growing movement to not just remove memorials honoring Confederate generals but to make sure the counter-narrative is recognized and heard. That sentiment informs his coming book, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory, which will be published in October by the West Virginia University Press."
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