Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

"Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq is about looking for war knowledge in unexpected places, such as war memorials, museum exhibitions, war cemeteries, and novels and memoirs. What one finds there can contradict the prescribed understandings of a particular war or, say, endorse the tendency to treat military personnel as heroes to be thanked. Especially when 'ordinary curators' display memories of their war experiences through the objects left at memorials and graves, or through the words they curate in war novels, the observer/reader gets a glimpse of actual lives lost, futures cut short and even some of the dull noncombat jobs military do in war zones. The main point is that war is a social institution and its experiences are plentiful and decentralized. Many scholars and other interested readers look for war in the decisions and movements of militaries and states, but this book's difference is that it focuses on how a variety of formal and informal war curators present the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq at a moment of American militarism"--