Landmark Lecture: On National Commemorations

In this talk, M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska will draw from her book on the 1976 Bicentennial as well as in-progress research about how Americans are engaging history now to explore and explain the way that national commemorations help to clarify, crystalize, and accelerate emergent trends in historical engagement. During the Bicentennial, Americans became interested in more personal, immersive and interactive forms of history. How will the upcoming Semiquincentennial reflect what history looks like now?

About the spaker: M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska is an interdisciplinary cultural historian of the 19th- and 20th-century United States and an associate professor of history and public history at American University. Her research interests include public history, museum studies, historiography, visual and material culture, and communications and media history. She is the author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), which traces the emergence of immersive engagement with the past in postwar American culture and numerous articles in scholarly journals.

She is a New America Us@250 fellow and Smithsonian Research Associate and was recently Visiting Research Fellow the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, a 2023-4 Scholar-In-Residence at the Heurich House Museum.

M.J. is on the Board of Directors of Humanities DC, the editorial board of Washington History, on advisory boards for the D.C. History Center and the Humanities Truck, and serves as series editor for the National Park Service and National Council on Public History’s 2021-2025 American Revolution 250th Commemoration Scholars' Forums . Her work has been profiled in the Washington Post, New York Times, Bloomberg and Time magazine, and in 2022, she was a featured commentator on Netflix’s D.B. Cooper, Where Are You? documentary.

She is currently working on two new book projects—the first about the history of visitors and newcomers to Washington entitled Your Nation’s Capital: How Visitors Made Washington D.C., and Vice Versa. She is also completing a shorter monograph called The Historian and the Historian-ish: Notes on the Future of the Past.

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