Interpreting 'sacred ground': The rhetoric of National Park Service Civil War historical battlefields and parks

The National Park Service (NPS), since 1916, has been the federal agency responsible for identifying, preserving, and interpreting those public spaces deemed of historic, cultural, natural, and scenic national significance. Scholars and the general public have evaluated the Park Service's ability to preserve material and cultural landscapes with the appropriate measure of accuracy, authenticity, and discretion. Despite the Park Service's tremendous influence on preserving and crafting public memory and national history, efforts to understand how the Park Service interprets, or creates meaning, at these public spaces has been largely overlooked.;This dissertation suggests that the Park Service's institutional prioritizing of historic preservation has slowed its ability to recognize the influence of commemorative traditions on their interpretation of the Civil War. Implications for the continued appropriation of the national reconciliation and emancipationist commemorative traditions in National Park Service interpretive history programs are discussed.;This dissertation examines how interpretive exhibits at Harpers Ferry National Park and Gettysburg National Military Park tacitly utilize the conflicting commemorative traditions of national reconciliation and emancipation to craft historical narratives about the Civil War. Recent NPS interpretation at Harpers Ferry National Park uses an African-American emancipationist memory of the Civil War to link John Brown's slave rebellion to a larger national narrative of racial progress. Interpretive exhibits at Gettysburg National Military Park selectively appropriate fragments of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to interpret the speech as a commemorative tribute to the heroism and valor of white Union and Confederate soldiers. Articulated in the late nineteenth century commemorative tradition of national reconciliation, the ideology of heroic white masculinity frames the Park Service's military history narrative of the battle of Gettysburg, "preserving" that ideology to its prewar hegemony.