Week 9: Thoughts

The idea of multiculturalism and how communities address this diversity are prevalent to the arguments of Glassberg and Levinson. Glassberg used parades, history pageants, and community celebrations to examine how communities dealt with asserting ethnic and class differences, and ultimately attempted to create a unified city image. By examining the history of the city celebration, Glassberg illustrated the progression of city celebrations as they transformed from a bottom-up approach that enforced differences among classes and ethnicities to a top-down approach that focused on the unified city of multiculturalism. Regardless, all of the celebrations had political motives and were about creating and honoring an image of a specific community, whether of a specific class or ethnic group or a unified city. Glassberg argued that the city carnival proved to be the most successful in creating a memory of a unified, multicultural city. Despite a successful memory perpetuated by newspapers, San Francisco’s Portola Festival of 1909 was organized and run by a committee that was attempting to expose the Labor Party. The festival did not include the labor unions or African American or Mexican residents of the city. The realities of the festival are essential to understanding that these city celebrations of multiculturalism were a created memory for the promotion of economic and administrative systems, as well as the cultivation of “the powerful emotion of rooting for the home team” (Glassberg 85).

Levinson took a more critical approach by examining the South’s continual display of Confederate war flags and memorials despite their implications of oppression and racism. Though Levinson used arguments from historians who supported these public displays of Confederate history as representations of legitimate political and military actions that supported states’ rights, he asserted that they remain representations of an oppressive, chattel system. Levinson’s approach in analyzing the validity of state-sponsored Confederate history displays was rather interesting. He examined the constitutionality of a state supporting the displays since they promoted one ideology over another. Levinson used the First Amendment and approached it as freedom of religion and the responsibility the states have in remaining neutral. In his most intriguing approach, Levinson compared Confederate monuments and flags to the display of Nazi imagery in Germany. By making this comparison, Levinson focused on the oppressive nature of slavery that southerners often ignore. As a society attempting to promote its history, generations, not directly involved in slavery and the Civil War, have to find ways to address sensitive issues without marginalizing or continually oppressing certain groups.

Glassberg and Levinson argued that a unified history is difficult to achieve in a nation of immense diversity. Ultimately, the public remains subjected to the “discourse about the most basic use of public space and the construction o f a public narrative (and ultimately, a public psyche) that pays due heed to the complexities of the past that we share, with whatever unease” (Levinson 130-131). As other readings have discussed, it is this type of dialogue that promotes growth in understanding.