PROPOSAL TYPE
Roundtable
SEEKING
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
RELATED TOPICS
- Memory
- Museums/Exhibits
- Public Engagement
- Reflections on the Field
ABSTRACT
Anniversaries are often an opportunity to celebrate key figures and moments in history and to reflect on their significance to our present. They also, however, function as a way to label an event as “finished” –to eulogize it, often through speeches, the dedication of monuments, or other commemorative practices. When we celebrate anniversaries, we are also implicitly suggesting that an event is over and ready to fit a particular historical interpretation. What does it mean to consider an anniversary celebration as a eulogy? On this historic anniversary of our nation’s founding, have we also written a eulogy for the American republic? How might reading the events of America250 as eulogies help us articulate this moment of crisis?
DESCRIPTION
Anniversaries are charged spaces in public history: they draw attention to historic sites, and offer opportunities to celebrate historical figures, places, and events. Frequently, however, they are also a chance to affirm and solidify a preferred historical narrative in the public sphere: to label an event as “closed” or “dead,” and to eulogize the role that such a figure, place, or event played in history, but, implicitly, plays no longer. Anniversaries, in this way, come to resemble funerary rituals, ones which both open new possibilities to reconsider legacies but which also ask celebrants to accept certain aspects of the historical narrative as closed fact.
We are facing, in 2026, a particularly fraught example: the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, one which coincides with the erosion of democratic norms and the fierce rewriting of our national history. What would it mean to mark this anniversary by writing a eulogy for the American republic? As scholars of museums, memory, and monuments, we hope to facilitate a conversation about the ways that anniversaries have been used in each of these commemorative spaces, and to consider how we might reckon with this current anniversary through the language of eulogy.
We hope to facilitate a roundtable discussion about the idea of anniversaries as eulogies writ-large. We seek both potential contributions from scholars watching the various events scheduled for America250 and from other events and experiences that might fit this framework, including but not limited to:
-Reflections on key anniversaries like the Civil War Centennial and the American bicentennial
-Ignored anniversaries such as the fifth anniversary of the Capitol Insurrection on January 6th, 2021 and the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic
-Embodied, textual, and built commemorations that coincide with anniversaries
-Loss of funding and political attacks on people and institutions engaged in studying marginalized heritage
We also welcome new theoretical angles, including from performance studies, museum studies, and memory studies. How might reconceptualizing these acts as funerary open new avenues for our understanding of both the American past and our current moment of crisis?
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly:
Eliana Chavkin, Brown University, [email protected]
All feedback and offers of assistance should be sent by November 15, 2025. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
I love the framing of this potential session! Especially when discussing what “anniversaries” the US government choses to “celebrate” or ignore. I am also intrigued by how federal holidays could play into this conversation? I can’t help but think of “anniversaries” like Christopher Columbus Day and how more people choose to reject him as a celebratory figure, but rather reframe Oct 12 at Indigenous Peoples Day. Additionally, a conversation around Juneteenth, celebrated by Black Americans for over 100 years yet only becoming a federal holiday in 2021, could also be interesting. I already have so many thoughts and hope your session is successful with the programming committee.
I’m very excited by the framing of this session, especially mourning as a way to understand what has been lost, or what is missing. Mourning could also be a prerequisite for action, or envisioning futures.
You might consider reaching out to sites or places that have had experience marking anniversaries as commemorations rather than celebrations. They may have lessons for the 250th. In 2025, there have been several important anniversaries that received muted attention (largely due to the activities in the US), although I believe that communities were deeply engaged (e.g. the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the end of World War II, the passage of the Voting Rights Act).
Two commemorations in 2025 stand out to me: 1) the commemoration of the completion of the Erie Canal–and the insistence of Indigenous people that their experience of the canal be part of the commemoration & 2) the ongoing commemoration of the murder of Emmett Till by communities in the Mississippi Delta, Jackson, MS, and Illinois. The commemorations highlighted the importance of Mamie Till-Mobley, the actions of everyday people, and the significance of the Great Migration, and particularly the role of trains.
Good luck!
I’ll echo the praise for what I think is an important and timely topic. In addition to what others have mentioned, I’m thinking here of the rise of community remembrance projects sponsored by the Equal Justice Initiative across the American South. Over the past decade, these groups have helped to commemorate racial terror in place. I think in this case it perhaps serves as a productive counterpoint to the “finishing” of an event–these forms of eulogizing suggest the non-closure of the event and the prolongation of that terror. I’ve written about this, but I’m also in touch with lots of local community folks working on these issues. Feel free to reach out if I can be helpful!
Very interesting framework! The notion of the eulogy in the sense that is acts as tribute and often embodies a collective set of memories and stories resonates with some of our interpretive approaches at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
Jumping on the bandwagon to give praise for this proposal and to also think about how we consider events traumatic to communities and how those should be commemorated/eulogized. I think about Philly, and cities that were sites of racial massacres–especially when the demographics of that space has changed overtime, and the history either ends up being lost or brushed aside. I would love this to be a conversation that lasts beyond the anniversary and leans into care beyond the date, if that makes sense.