American Memory: Images to Remember

Marines at Iwo Jima
Issued July 11, 1945

American Memory:
Images to Remember

Notes by Peter Y. Chou
WisdomPortal.com

Mount Rushmore
Issued Aug. 11, 1952

Preface: After reading Robert Pinsky's essay "Poetry and American Memory" and his poem "Shirt", I felt these were important ideas to share with friends. I gave copies to an Irish American, a Mexican American, and a Russian Jewish American. I was born in China and grew up in America, so we all came from different ethnic background. We met for an hour discussion at Foothill College Middlefield Computer Lab Staff Lounge on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2007 from 9-10 pm. I told my friends that Pinsky wrote about "American Memory" through the eyes of poetry, but we could approach it through art, music, film, and sports as well. I'm assembling some of these images that provoke a sense of identity about America.

Art Images of America
John Trumbull, Declaration of Independence (1819)
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851)
Daniel Chester French, Lincoln Memorial (1922)
Thomas Hart Benton, The Prodigious Century (1924-1965)
Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930)
Gutzon Borglum, Mount Rushmore (1941)
Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982)

Film Images of America
Frank Capra, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Michael Curtiz, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
(starring James Cagney)
Vincente Minnelli, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Elia Kazan, America, America (1963)
Arthur Penn, Bonny and Clyde (1967)
Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather (1972)
Steven Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Literature Images of America
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)

Music Images of America
The Army Goes Rolling Along (1908)
From the Halls of Montezuma (1859)
(Music: "Gendarmes' Duet" from the opera
Geneviève de Brabant by Jacques Offenbach)
Samuel A. Ward, America the Beautiful (1882),
Katharine Lee Bates (lyrics 1893 & 1913)
George M. Cohan, Over There (1917)
Irving Berlin, God Bless America (1938)
Francis Scott Key, Star-Spangled Banner (1814)
Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land (1940)
George M. Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy
Ray Gilbert (lyrics) & Allie Wrubel (music), Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah (1945)
(from the Walt Disney movie Song of the South, 1946)

Photography Images of America
Wright Brothers First Flight, Kitty Hawk (Dec. 17, 1903)
Alfred Eisenstaedt, Kissing Couple: Times Square (1945)
JFK Inaugural Address (Jan. 20, 1961)
Martin Luther King: "I Have a Dream" (Aug. 28, 1963)

Poetry Images of America
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Concord Hymn" (1837)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" (1860)
Walt Whitman, "O Captain! My Captain!" (1865, 1888)
Robert Pinsky, An Explanation of America (1979)
Maya Angelou, "A Rock, A River, A Tree" (Clinton's Inaugural, Jan. 20, 1993)

Sports Images of America

Web Pages on Being an American
Theodore Roosevelt on Immigrants and being an American