Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, And Consumerism From Oklahoma City To Ground Zero

Sturken contends that a consumer culture of comfort objects such as World Trade Center snow globes, FDNY teddy bears, and Oklahoma City Memorial t-shirts and branded water, as well as reenactments of traumatic events in memorial and architectural designs, enables a national tendency to see U.S. culture as distant from both history and world politics. A kitsch comfort culture contributes to a “tourist” relationship to history: Americans can feel good about visiting and buying souvenirs at sites of national mourning without having to engage with the economic, social, and political causes of the violent events. While arguing for the importance of remembering tragic losses of life, Sturken is urging attention to a dangerous confluence—of memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch—that promulgates fear to sell safety, offers prepackaged emotion at the expense of critical thought, contains alternative politics, and facilitates public acquiescence in the federal government’s repressive measures at home and its aggressive political and military policies abroad.

• Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall
• The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (The Public Square)
• The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
• Pickett's Charge in History and Memory
• Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape
• Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, New Edition
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
• The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
• The Making of the "Rape of Nanking": History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)