Memorializing Tragedy
Looking at different memorials...
The Irish Hunger Memorial (New York, NY)
The Famine Memorial (Dublin, Ireland)
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin, Germany)
The stories of September 11, 2001 are very recent in the minds of most Americans, and they are still being formed in political and cultural debate, but other attacks and catastrophes from times past might give us clues to how history is created through storytelling. How do we understand a previous event or why is an event no longer recalled? Might the event have impacted your community in some way, or the families of other students? How did things change or not as a result of the event? If we were writing history, how would we decide whether to include the event? If not, why not? Below are six "events" - tragic events. Consider and investigate how the stories of these events were “constructed” and how those stories have changed - in the telling and importance - over time. Do different groups within the United States remember those events differently, and how do those differences affect the way we think and what we do? As individuals and as a community or a nation? What kinds of questions can we ask about these events? How will we research how such events might have touched their own families and community? How will we tell the stories we learn to all the other students, from different places, in our groups?
How do we decide if information is "good"? What is the source? Can we confirm it?
We can start to explore the past as historians do. We begin by looking for stories and images from the time of the event, and then we will look for stories told afterwards. We begin to decide whether what we find is reliable and confirmable (verifiable) information, not just an opinion. We will try to find out about the authors of the stories. Why did they tell or write these stories?
We will think about all of ways that events are recalled, and we can do this by accessing global news sources. Newspapers carry many kinds of stories around big events, including retrospectives. Comparing what seemed important on the day an event was first reported with coverage years later will help us build a sense of how history gets written.
We can begin to look at six different events which had profound impacts on Americans at the time that they occurred. All were considered "unforgettable" in their eras, yet, obviously, some have been, largely, forgotten. Why? How?
The new World Trade Center is now almost completed in New York.
The New York Times Op Docs
Both the 9/11 Memorial and the Vietnam War Memorial list the names of those killed, but how those names are listed is very, very different. What is the difference? What is the impact of that difference? How might differing design processes have led to that difference?