As Americans of all political persuasions look back longingly to a preferred past, the power of nostalgia feels inescapable. Our fraught moment calls for investigation of the diverse ways in which appeals were made to tradition in earlier epochs. This pair of panels uses Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition as a conceptual model for such a discussion; however, it casts a wider net, examining nostalgic uses of the past in Europe and North America over four centuries (1500-1900.) Whereas The Invention of Tradition emphasized practices, especially ritual practices, these panels focus on a wider array of nostalgic foci including monuments and other buildings, war and natural disasters, ceremony, and travel.

This panel considers the histories of nostalgia within the United States, specifically through Boston. Nineteenth-century Boston flourished as a center of art, history, and culture. These papers consider three different ways in which nostalgia functioned within larger conversations of what it meant to be a part of not only burgeoning American culture and a citizen of the world. Chad Holmes’s paper looks to the office of the sheriff through the example of Charles P. Sumner. Holmes considers how the political instability of Jacksonian America shaped a form of nostalgia for the British monarchial system, and the notion of the sheriff and their deputies as monuments to a past of pride and prestige in law and order. Brian Maxson’s paper examines the role of tourism in the creation of a mythical past for the new United States through the Grand Tour of the Waterson family. Maxson utilizes letters, art sketches, and itineraries to unearth how nostalgia and desire for a deeper past shaped which sites Americans visited in Europe and even how Americans and their hosts engaged with each other in a nineteenth-century tourist economy. Amy Sopcak-Joseph’s paper centers on the creation and commemoration of the Bunker Hill Monument, an obelisk erected in a nostalgic effort to mark the sacrifices of the American Revolution. Sopcak-Joseph illuminates how women’s roles were obscured in its creation, and how fundraising campaigns for the Monument contributed to evolving cultural conversations about parameters for women’s roles in the historical memory of the founding of their nation.

The papers in this panel—as in its companion, “Histories of Nostalgia: Case Studies from Europe”—emphasize that nostalgia is not just, or even primarily, a political tool. Instead, both panels demonstrate that nostalgia represents a rich field of contestation in which diverse parties construct cultural arguments to further their own legitimacy. It also serves as a tool for delimiting parameters of inclusion and exclusion. We hope that these panels will facilitate future conversations and serve as the foundation for a volume of collected essays.