| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ellen M. Litwicki. America's Public Holidays 1865–1920. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. 2000. Pp. ix, 293. $39.95.

Following the Civil War, the struggle to forge a United States moved off the battlefields and into the cultural arenas of national life. Unlike the case in many other countries, the government did not play a direct role in constructing national culture until its intervention during World War I. Instead, diverse groups competed for sufficient cultural authority to decide which national narratives—histories, icons, rituals, heroes, and holidays—would define what it meant to be an American. Some have even described the turn of the last century as an age of patriotism because of the unprecedented efforts at creating and institutionalizing a unified national culture. 1

The promise of emancipation and the triumph of reaction form the bookends of the dynamic period between the Civil War and World War I. Organizations and individuals within nationalist movements espoused divergent political views on what it meant to be an American, spanning democratic values of equality and social justice for all to militaristic demands for law and order. The invention of new public holidays and the revision of older ones, argues Ellen M. Litwicki, reflected the diversity rather than the homogeneity of public culture. Over twenty-five holidays were invented between 1865 and 1920, from Memorial and Labor Days to Emancipation and Haymarket Martyr's Days. Unlike holiday books that emphasize a celebratory approach to national unity, Litwicki is concerned with processes of difference, conflict, and negotiation in the collective rituals of holiday-making. . . .

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