ENTOMBED VOICES: THE CONSTRUCTION OF ESTABLISHED HISTORIES AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF COUNTER-NARRATIVES WITHIN PUBLIC HISTORY
| Author(s) | Mahon, Francis | |
| Date Accessioned | 2018-09-28T16:50:32Z | |
| Date Available | 2018-09-28T16:50:32Z | |
| Publication Date | 2018-05 | |
| Abstract | The American history that students and tourists are exposed to today is a whitewashed and nationalistic history that has been normalized for centuries by a dominant habitus that creates public monuments and historical structures. The normative American historical narrative is one that focuses more on the struggles, accomplishments, and histories of white heterosexual cis-gender males of European descent instead of women, people of color, or non cis-gender people. The goal of this thesis is to explore the realm of public history through the anthropological framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s Practice Theory and seeks to understand the structures of power involved in producing a dominant historical narrative. By conducting both archival and ethnographic fieldwork in Savannah, Georgia and Lewes, Delaware this thesis argues that through the erasure of a person of people’s public history their access to current day resource, political, social, and economic are limited. This thesis also suggests that one way to reverse this erasure of history is through the installation of counter-narratives and alternative histories meant to contest physical manifestations of the dominant historical narrative. Through the implementation of contesting alternative histories a visitor will be forced to question why some histories are valued more than others, and what kind of consequences people with erased histories face today. | en_US |
| Advisor | Carla Guerron Montero | |
| Program | Anthropology | |
| URL | http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/23862 | |
| Publisher | University of Delaware | en_US |
| Keywords | Anthropology, counter-narratives, public history, | en_US |
| Title | ENTOMBED VOICES: THE CONSTRUCTION OF ESTABLISHED HISTORIES AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF COUNTER-NARRATIVES WITHIN PUBLIC HISTORY | en_US |
| Type | Thesis | en_US |