Memories Set in Stone—How Visitors Make Sense of Memorials

In this open access book, Larissa Hugentobler explores the world of public memorials: highly visible, and at times contentious, media, which communicate a nation’s values and ideals – its public memory.

By celebrating a selection of a nation’s history, the memorial landscape has long rendered marginalized groups virtually invisible.

This book focuses on two rare, celebratory, U.S. memorials in Washington, DC., dedicated to a member of a marginalized community: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The author explores how visitors experience the two cultural sites, including their narratives about King and the Civil Rights Movement. For a holistic understanding, Hugentobler combines analyses of visitor experiences on site and on Instagram with expert interviews and autoethnographies. This allows for insights into the importance of celebratory memorials to individuals from marginalized communities and why those memorials matter to visitors. By acknowledging that the memorial experience is not limited to the time and space of a visit, this book begins to answer the urgent question of the roles of the offline and online realms in commemoration and highlights how each can contribute to a memorial landscape that is meaningful to a variety of people.