Linenthal, Edward Tabor. Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
In Sacred Ground, Edward Linenthal documents how America's most famous battlefields--Lexington and Concord, the Alamo, Gettysburg, the Little Bighorn, and Pearl Harbor--were transformed into commemorative, sacred spaces that serve as shrines to American patriotism, heroism and nationhood. Because of this power, these places also became contested spaces, where Americans of various ideological persuasions came to compete for a leading role in powerful national stories. The author describes this as a process of veneration, defilement and redefinition that is common to all of the battlefields listed above. Forms of veneration include patriotic rhetoric, monument building, battlefield preservation and battle reenactment. These serve to articulate traditional patriotism, which makes symbolic connections between heroic sacrifice in the past and continuation in the modern world. Defilement can be ideological, such as an attempt to redefine the meaning of a battle, or physical, such as building a modern development adjacent to a battlefield. In his final statement, Linenthal pleads that no one should be allowed to win the struggle for exclusive ownership of these places, that it is a sign of ideological maturity if the public can accept that there is more than one story to be told, one perspective to be related. [S. Trail]