Spotlights and Shadows: Presidents and Their Administrations in Presidential Museum Exhibits

2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 117-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN HUFBAUER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Presidential Power ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
History Museums

Abstract: This article focuses on the museums in presidential libraries. Since 1940 the rise of the federal presidential library has transformed presidential memorialization by largely allowing presidents—initially, at least—to commemorate themselves. This has populated the landscape of public memory in the United States with a series of history museums that promote an expansive view of presidential power. These museums also attempt to elevate individual presidents into the civil religion of the United States. This article examines the largely celebratory accounts in some presidential libraries, and contrasts them with the Truman Library's more balanced and historically accurate approach.

By Executive Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Rudalevige
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Chief Executive ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Federal Agencies ◽  
Presidential Power ◽  
Executive Order ◽  
Personal Power ◽  
Executive Orders

The president of the United States is commonly thought to wield extraordinary personal power through the issuance of executive orders. In fact, the vast majority of such orders are proposed by federal agencies and shaped by negotiations that span the executive branch. This book provides the first comprehensive look at how presidential directives are written — and by whom. The book examines more than five hundred executive orders from the 1930s to today — as well as more than two hundred others negotiated but never issued — shedding vital new light on the multilateral process of drafting supposedly unilateral directives. The book draws on a wealth of archival evidence from the Office of Management and Budget and presidential libraries as well as original interviews to show how the crafting of orders requires widespread consultation and compromise with a formidable bureaucracy. It explains the key role of management in the presidential skill set, detailing how bureaucratic resistance can stall and even prevent actions the chief executive desires, and how presidents must bargain with the bureaucracy even when they seek to act unilaterally. Challenging popular conceptions about the scope of presidential power, the book reveals how the executive branch holds the power to both enact and constrain the president's will.

Rumors on the Net: A Brackish Suspension of Speech and Hate

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211988012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Wagner ◽  
Sarah Marusek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Cyber Culture ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Mob Mentality

The legitimacy of public memory and socially normative standards of civility is questioned through rumors that abound on online social media platforms. On the Net, the proclivity of rumors is particularly prone to acts of bullying and frameworks of hate speech. Legislative attempts to limit rumors operate differently in France and throughout Europe from the United States. This article examines the impact of online rumors, the mob mentality, and the politicization of bullying critics within a cyber culture that operates within the limitations of law.

U.S. Foreign Policy and Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Magee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Religious People ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Nations ◽  
In The Beginning

The United States has been uniquely God-centered among Western nations, and that includes its foreign policy. From George Washington to the present, all presidents and policymakers have had to consider God in varying degrees either for their domestic audience or because they believed in a version of Providential mission in the world. In the beginning, the new United States was filled with religious people whom the founders had to consider in crafting the founding documents. In time, the very idea of the United States became so entwined with the sense of the Divine that American civil religion dominated even the most secular acts of policymakers.

Religious Pilgrimages in the United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan E. Campo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Sacred Place

Pilgrimage, as a type of religious journey, involves embodied movement across geographic, social, political, cultural, and often religious boundaries to a sacred place or landscape. It is arguably a universal phenomenon that can engage individual pilgrims or millions, especially with the onset of modernity, which has facilitated travel over distances great and small. As an aspect of religious life in the United States, pilgrimage is often overlooked. Nevertheless, the country’s landscape encompasses numerous sites of sacred significance associated with organized religions, civil religion, and facets of its cultural religion that attract millions of visitors annually. As a dynamic set of phenomena, pilgrimages to such sites are constantly evolving, affected by factors such as religious and social movements, national politics, immigration, and tourism.

The Body Politic and the Politics of Two Bodies: Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in Death

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
The Body ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
American Nation

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.

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