Tropes of a Texan trauma: monumental Dallas after John F. Kennedy

Dealey Plaza in central Dallas serves both as a ‘cradle’ and a ‘grave’; at this historic site Dallas was born and an American president died. The assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 changed Dealey Plaza, the site where the first citizen of Dallas settled in 1841, from a symbol of civic pride into a place of guilt and shame. After the events of 1963, the Dallas community voiced a wish to forget and hence, the exact location where Kennedy was murdered was initially remembered by neither monument nor plaque. At the same time, America grieved and from all over the country US citizens started to visit the assassination site. Dealey Plaza became a place of pilgrimage, which caused a change in the monumental landscape and eventually transformed civic guilt into civic pride. This article offers an analysis of the responses to this Texan trauma in terms of commemorative heritage and describes Dallas’ shift from ‘amnesia’ to ‘identification’, two contrary responses to traumatic, or mourning, heritage.     

JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore the phenomenon that the authors have entitled Dark Tourism and to analyse evidence of its existence in the context of sites associated with the life and death of the former US President, John F. Kennedy (JFK). These sites present front‐line staff, curators, and development bodies with dilemmas concerning legitimacy of presentation/representation and lead to questions about the, often cited, educational mission, of such attractions. The media has had a central role in the development of this phenomenon and documentation and illustration via news and film has been central to much of the interpretation of JFK and the Kennedys. This paper considers media fascination with this subject and examines exploitation of this interest at three, contrasting sites.     

Politician or Poet? The 6th Lord Byron in the House of Lords, 1809–13

Lord George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale, is known internationally as, perhaps, the most famous Romantic poet of his generation. His work continues to be read across the globe. As a peer (succeeding to the title following the death of his great uncle, the 5th Baron Byron, in 1798) he was entitled to a seat in the Lords, and this article covers the period during which he was active in the House. He took his seat in 1809, but most of his work in the Lords took place between early 1812 and the summer of 1813. Thereafter, his financial troubles, his stellar literary career, and his personal problems, led him to spend little or no time in the House, and he lived abroad between 1816 and his death in 1824. In 1812, before he had become known for his poetry, except among a small London elite, he began actively to cultivate a political career, and he made his maiden speech on the Framework Knitters Bill in 1812. Byron was a prolific letter writer, and from his published correspondence as well as other sources of contemporary information, it is possible to document his growing career in the upper House, and to see how a young peer might make his way into politics in the absence of a particular sponsor.     

Subsistence and Settlement Correlates of Treponemal Disease: Temporal Patterns in Pre‐Columbian East Tennessee

After ca 1000 BC , coinciding with the transition to sedentism, tertiary stage treponemal disease apparently becomes osteologically pervasive in pre‐Columbian North America. However, varying interobserver treponemal disease diagnostic thresholds, sampling error and the possibly ecosensitive nature of the pre‐Columbian nonvenereal treponemal disease variants (i.e. yaws and treponarid) prevents subsistence‐settlement pattern from becoming a reliable predictor of treponemal disease prevalence. This is particularly true of later prehistory with the transition from horticulture to intensive, maize‐based agriculture. To address whether treponemal disease visibility does vary across this specific subsistence‐settlement threshold, subadults (4+ years of age) and adults from 11 late prehistoric sites (N = 997) from the same geographic area of East Tennessee were sampled for the presence of treponemal disease. Six sites (N = 279) primarily date to the Late Woodland period (AD 700–900) and culturally belong to what is referred to as the Hamilton mortuary complex. The sample is archaeologically characterised as horticulturalist with presumably a dispersed farmstead or hamlet settlement pattern. Six sites (N = 718) date to the Late Mississippian (AD 1300–1550, Dallas phase) and are maize‐intensive agriculturalists with a large, aggregate village settlement pattern. The sites were examined using three different levels of treponemal disease diagnostic confidence. Treponemal disease raw frequency does indeed differ across the levels of diagnostic confidence between the total Late Woodland horticulturalist sample (4.3–5.5%) and total Late Mississippian maize agriculturalist sample (5.4–6.5%). The meaning is complex as the Dallas phase sample may have a socially segregated elite; the mound‐interred (1.8%) relative to the village‐interred (6.1–7.4%) exhibited significantly fewer cases of treponemal disease. Tentatively, treponemal disease visibility does appear to co‐associate with sedentism and perhaps (if the mound‐interred Dallas individuals are elites) also aggregated settlement. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.