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... As Michael Kammen points out in his overarching treatment on the role of memory in formulating American culture, Mystic Chords of Memory, the first group is more often than not conflated with the second.
If the symbolism of the Pilgrims occupy the foreground of popular memory, it does so in a relatively fixed, institutional sense--that of its enshrinement in the Rotunda, and its memorialization through a National holiday. ... But it is then Puritanism whose meaning has proved the more dynamic, the more vital to the discourse of public memory. ... It is the "paper trail" that the Puritans left behind, along with their strong strain of ideology, which Kammen notes as the distinguishing features of their role in popular memory (Kammen, 64). ... That is, as alternate modes of "hope" and "memory," progress and tradition, inform the collective understanding of what the nation has come from and where it is headed, its conception of cultural and social identity is transformed in the process.
Approximate Word count = 3038
Approximate Pages = 12.2
(250 words per page double spaced)
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