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3 books match the query 'Memory at'

cover of Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen

Dance Floor Democracy

The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen

Sherrie Tucker

Duke University Press, 2014

Open from 1942 until 1945, the Hollywood Canteen was the most famous of the patriotic home front nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations. Since the opening night, when the crowds were so thick that Bette Davis had to enter through the bathroom window to give her welcome speech, the storied dance floor where movie stars danced with soldiers has been the subject of much U.S. nostalgia about the "Greatest Generation." Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the wartime nightclub, Sherrie Tucker explores how jitterbugging swing culture has come to represent the war in U.S. national memory. Yet her interviewees' varied experiences and recollections belie the possibility of any singular historical narrative. Some recall racism, sexism, and inequality on the nightclub's dance floor and in Los Angeles neighborhoods, dynamics at odds with the U.S. democratic, egalitarian ideals associated with the Hollywood Canteen and the "Good War" in popular culture narratives. For Tucker, swing dancing's torque—bodies sharing weight, velocity, and turning power without guaranteed outcomes—is an apt metaphor for the jostling narratives, different perspectives, unsteady memories, and quotidian acts that comprise social history.
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cover of The Archaeology of Tibes: Life, Death, and Memory at an Early Ceremonial Center in the Caribbean

The Archaeology of Tibes

Life, Death, and Memory at an Early Ceremonial Center in the Caribbean

Edited by L. Antonio Curet and Lisa M. Stringer

University of Alabama Press, 2025

A collection of new essays that brings archaeological insights and discoveries at the Tibes Ceremonial Center up to date

The Archaeology of Tibes is a collection of essays offering a fresh analysis of this important ceremonial center. It brings new insights about social structure, illuminating the smaller-scale daily lives of ancient peoples rather than focusing on large-scale chiefdoms.

Tibes is the earliest known (ca. 400 to 1300 CE) ceremonial center in Puerto Rico. It has been the focus of one of the largest and longest-running archaeological programs in the Caribbean. Early researchers interpreted evidence in the area of a shift from dispersed villages to a ceremonial center as suggesting the development of social stratification and accumulation of power. Seen as the seat of an early chiefdom, Tibes served as a model applied broadly across the Greater Antilles.

New discoveries prompted archaeologists to question their original assumptions about ancient Puerto Rico, and later research failed to produce evidence of social stratification at Tibes. The Archaeology of Tibes therefore incorporates updated and wider perspectives on social formation. It considers agency, decisions, and events and the possibility of more than one form of social organization. It also presents a more accurate “humanized” past: the sociological meanings of that space and its significance for the people who created, used, and occupied it and who influenced rituals, social memory, and community.

Summarizing findings from excavations at Tibes after 2010, the collection also reviews the geoarchaeology of the site. Additional essays cover ceramic pastes, lithic production, faunal remains, coral, burials, and rock art. This work will engender discussion and future research by archaeologists across the Caribbean and beyond.
 

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cover of The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings

The Spectacle of History

Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings

Michael Lynch and David Bogen, eds.

Duke University Press, 1996

How is history produced? How do individuals write—or rewrite—their parts while engaged in the production of history? Michael Lynch and David Bogen take the example of the Iran-contra hearings to explore these questions. These hearings, held in 1987 by the Joint House-Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaragua Opposition, provided the nation with a media spectacle and a rare chance to see a struggle over the writing of history. There was Oliver North, prime suspect and designated scapegoat, turning into a hero of the American Right before the very eyes of the nation. How this transformation occurred, with the complicity of the press and the public, becomes disturbingly clear in The Spectacle of History.
Lynch and Bogen detail the practices through which the historical agents at the center of the hearings composed, confirmed, used, erased, and denied the historical record. They show how partisan skirmishes over the disclosure of records and testimony led to a divided and irresolute outcome, an outcome further facilitated by the “applied deconstruction” deployed by North and his allies. The Spectacle of History immerses the reader in a crowded field of texts, utterances, visual displays, and media commentaries, but, more than a case study, it develops unique insight into problems at the heart of society and social theory—lying and credibility, the production of civic spectacle, the relationship between testimony and history, the uses of memory, and the interplay between speech and writing.
Drawing on themes from sociology, literary theory, and ethnomethodology and challenging prevailing concepts held by contemporary communication and cultural studies, Lynch and Bogen extract valuable theoretical lessons from this specific and troubling historical episode.
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