In many places, I have seen monuments with lists of soldiers. Many are small-town memorials, like those in Groton, Massachusetts, that list all the soldiers who fought in a certain war from a particular community. Others are national monuments, like the Vietnam War Memorial Wall, that list all the servicemen who were killed or missing in action in a particular war. These “citizen soldier” monuments form a genre distinct from those that commemorate either heroic individuals, usually commanders, or the soldier in abstract.

I wonder whether citizen-soldier monuments are unique to, or at least more prevalent in, the United States. The emphasis on the common soldier, especially as a volunteer from a community, seems to fit the American ideal of citizen rather than professional. If such monuments are not unique to the United States, I wonder when and why they began to be constructed. For example, Kings Mountain National Military Park has a monument with a list of the Patriot participants, but that monument dates, I believe, to the sesquicentennial of the battle in 1930. A monument often says as much about the people who made it as the people it commemorates.

I’m becoming increasingly interested in public history. This summer I intend to read more about public history, and I may volunteer at a local museum. I also have an idea (the kind of big idea that some say I rarely put into practice) for a public history project, but it’s too early to even sketch the details. In looking for a graduate school, one consideration is that it would let me have public history as a secondary field, or at least offer a few courses in the subject.

A valuable resource for studying public history is the Historical Marker Database. That website contains a wealth of user-submitted information about historical markers. The information can be browsed by location, by event, and by time period, and the makers can be overlaid onto Google Maps. The HMDB is a good example how Web 2.0 can be used for history. I intend to add to it whenever I can.