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WebLinks: Contexts for Exploring Visual and Verbal Texts |
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Chapter 8 - Debating Culture |
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The sites below give links to many different types of memorials, some of them "official," government-sponsored memorials, and others private. What do you think the purpose of a memorial is? What makes a memorial effective? Why do many memorials emphasize the collective rather than the individual?
http://www.aidsquilt.org/
The AIDS Quilt began in 1987 in San Francisco, which was at that time the epicenter of the AIDS crisis. While each panel (more are added every month) honors an individual life, the Quilt as a whole, with those individual panels symbolically sewn together, represents not just human loss but our capacity to come together in times of crisis. The organization's Web site provides a history of the quilt, photographs of many of its thousands of panels, and information about getting involved.
http://www.virtualwall.org/aboutwal.htm
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/lin/card1.html
http://www.nps.gov/vive/
These three sites each cover different aspects of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, perhaps the most famous permanent war memorial in the world. While the first site listed provides a purely factual history of the wall's creation, the second site discusses the experience of visiting it, its design elements, and the kinds of meaning we can pull out of it. The third page, from the National Parks Services Web site, provides practical information for visiting the memorial.
http://www.boston.com/famine/
http://www.janeholtzkay.com/Articles/hunger.html
While the tsunami in Southeast Asia in December, 2004, may be too recent to have inspired a permanent memorial, other natural disasters in history have. One of these was the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, which was responsible for the great waves of Irish immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century. Though long since assimilated into American culture, the Irish-American community in the cities of the Northeast largely still maintains a passionate connection to its roots. The first of these pages links to a Famine memorial in Boston; the second links to an article on the far more controversial Irish Hunger Memorial in New York City.
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