Date of Award
2026
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. History Dept.
Advisor(s)
Danae Jacobson
Second Advisor
Kelly Brignac
Abstract
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a turning point in mainstream America’s sense of national identity. A wave of nostalgia for the American Frontier enshrined the region’s idealized nineteenth-century past as myth. A key part of the story is romanticized violence—often depicted through cultural imagery of cowboys, gunfights, and battles with American Indians. This project seeks to understand more about how violence is represented in the cultural memory of the American Western past. Within the past twenty years, scholars of the American West have begun to incorporate the study of memory into their scholarship, frequently with how cultural institutions have used memory as a tool to build notions of American identity or how the experiences of minority groups have been obscured in the story of the building of the West. In my study, I examine the ways that events labeled as massacres—specifically using the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Sand Creek Massacre as case studies—have been remembered. In doing so, I argue that the afterlives of these massacres have acted as sites of contingent national community formation throughout the twentieth century. Analyzing the evolution of how these events have been remembered and reinterpreted points to powerful formulations about who belongs in the nation’s history and future.
Keywords
New Western History, Memory Studies, Massacre, Belonging, Violence, Cultural Memory
Recommended Citation
Burns, Kenzie, "Blood and Belonging: Remembering Massacres of the American West in the Twentieth Century, Mountain Meadows and Sand Creek" (2026). Honors Theses. Paper 1552.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/1552