War and Memory

FAIN: AV-286742-22

Bowie State University (Bowie, MD 20715-3319)
Karen B. Cook-Bell (Project Director: October 2021 to April 2022)
Karen B. Cook-Bell (Project Director: April 2022 to present)
Roger Davidson (Co Project Director: April 2022 to present)

An undergraduate seminar to train ROTC cadets and student veterans as discussion leaders, followed by a series of discussions with local veterans focused on personal and public memory in the Civil War and the Vietnam War through letters, literature, and historical writings.  

The Bowie State University (BSU) Department of History and Government, the BSU Department of Military Science, and the Honors College proposes to conduct a three-part program under the auspices of the NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War grant. The program, which will train Senior Army Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC) cadets and advanced student veterans to conduct discussion groups with local veterans, will explore how two wars, the Civil War and the Vietnam War, are imagined and remembered through three central themes: service, sacrifice, and reintegration. At the core of memories of war is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war. Before it became history, war became memory, since the experience of a great tragedy was felt at an individual, personal level. The narratives of war are thus made after an irrevocable “privatization” of the tragedy. The soldiers and civilians directly affected by the tragedy are faced with the direct, concrete, detai