When Memories and Discourses Collide: The President's House and Places of Public Memory

This paper proposes a loose model for illustrating how a multitude of discourses are pulled into political contests about the meanings of places of public memory. Specifically, the model suggests that selected discourses circulating around and within the memory place are pulled into the site by publics affectively invested in defining the site in particular ways. As, and after, those discourses collide within the place of memory, some stick and others are expelled—often to reappear in other, and sometimes related, controversies about public memory. These ideas are illustrated through a study of the controversy about how to best remember the past residents of the President's House, site of the nation's first executive mansion, in Independence National Historical Park.