The Statue of Liberty as Collective Memory and National Symbol
This paper examines the Statue of Liberty as a site of collective memory, drawing on Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman's Realms of Memory framework and Benedict Anderson's concept of the imagined community. It traces the statue's historically unpopular origins — including sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi's difficulty generating enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic — and follows the gradual layering of symbolic meaning through Emma Lazarus's poem, immigrant experience, wartime imagery, and public celebration. Ken Burns's PBS documentary serves as the primary lens through which these historical layers are examined, illustrating how national symbols derive their power less from factual origins than from the collective memories projected onto them over time.
- Introduction: History, Memory, and National Symbols: Introduces Nora's theory of history as rememoration
- Nora, Kritzman, and the Realm of Memory: Collective memory unifies opposing political extremes
- Benedict Anderson and the Imagined Community: Nations imagined through symbolic shared comradeship
- The Statue of Liberty's Unpopular Origins: Bartholdi's gift met indifference on both continents
- The Layering of Symbolic Meaning: Successive events transformed statue into iconic symbol
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What makes this paper effective
- Grounds a concrete historical case study (the Statue of Liberty) in established theoretical frameworks, showing how abstract concepts like "collective memory" apply to real-world symbols.
- Uses effective contrast — the statue's embarrassingly humble origins versus its current iconic status — to dramatize the paper's central argument about memory versus fact.
- Synthesizes multiple sources (Nora/Kritzman, Anderson, Burns) coherently rather than treating each in isolation, demonstrating interdisciplinary thinking.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models theory-to-evidence structure: it establishes a theoretical lens (collective memory, imagined community) before applying it to a specific case. This approach, common in cultural history and social science essays, allows the evidence to illuminate the theory rather than simply narrate facts.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by introducing Nora and Kritzman's memory framework, then brings in Anderson's complementary nation-building concept. It pivots to Ken Burns's documentary as primary evidence, first recounting the statue's unpopular factual origins, then cataloguing the successive symbolic layers that transformed it into an iconic national symbol. A brief Works Cited section closes the paper in MLA format.
Introduction: History, Memory, and National Symbols
The 7-volume French Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past and its condensed 3-volume English translation examine French history through the "collective memories" attached to powerful French symbols. Editor Pierre Nora summarizes France's history as "neither a resurrection nor a reconstitution nor a reconstruction nor even a representation but, in the strongest possible sense, a 'rememoration'" (Nora and Kritzman xxiv). In Nora's theory, history involves memory as "the overall structure of the past within the present" (Nora and Kritzman xxiv). Co-editor Kritzman adds, "Our knowledge of the past is less a question of our empirical grip on the past than on our apprehension of the past as we represent it through the lens of the present" (Nora and Kritzman xii).
Nora, Kritzman, and the Realm of Memory
Examining famous French symbols such as the Eiffel Tower and Joan of Arc (Nora and Kritzman xii), Nora's and Kritzman's work illustrates that the "realm of memory" surrounding a national symbol can incorporate so many cultural myths that it encompasses even the Far Left and Far Right of the political spectrum (Nora and Kritzman x). Joan of Arc, for example, provides inspiration for both political extremes in France because their "collective memories" of her — whatever her factual biography may be — create a "One-Saint-Fits-All" symbol for the French people (Nora and Kritzman x). In that respect, Nora's version of history is quite important for "nation building," because a nation's history is more a symbolic view of facts than a literal one.
Benedict Anderson and the Imagined Community
Benedict Anderson seems to build on Nora's view, stating that a nation "is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (The Nationalism Project: Nationalism Studies Information Clearinghouse). The famous documentarian Ken Burns apparently agrees with these theories, as his PBS documentary on the Statue of Liberty traces the statue's rough factual beginnings, the gradual layering of "remembered" meanings, and its current place as a potent symbol of freedom for Americans — whether politically Far Left, Moderate, or Far Right.
Works Cited
Ken Burns America Collection: The Statue of Liberty. Directed by Ken Burns. PBS Documentary, 2004. DVD.
Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Kritzman. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Book.
The Nationalism Project: Nationalism Studies Information Clearinghouse. "Benedict Anderson: The Nation as Imagined Community." 2007. Web. 4 December 2011.
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