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The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating Difficult Past

184 Words1 Pages
Nevertheless, the purpose of the memorial was controversial itself because there were different views on what the memorial would mean. In the article, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past”, Wagner and Schwartz state three issues that arise when a memorial will be constructed. “(1) the social problems of fixing painful parts of the past (a military defeat, a generation of unredeemed veterans) in the public consciousness, (2) the political problem of commemorating an event for which there is no national consensus, and (3) the cultural problem of working through and against traditional expectations about the war memorial genre” (Wagner and Schwartz). As a group, Americans had to cooperate with one another to determine
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