Commemorating the Lives of our Village

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 Commemorating the Lives of our Village


This past week, my group and I looked through various subject files about American Politics from Kenyon's archives. We found ourselves particularly interested in Kenyon's box on the Civil War. We looked at images from the Civil War, letters from Kenyon alumni during the time, and Kenyon's efforts to remember those who served in the Civil War. I was drawn to the files on how Kenyon attempted to remember those we lost from the Kenyon Community in the Civil War. In that file there was a proposed archway plan that would memorialize Kenyon’s contributions to the war. The idea of this came to be during the commencement week of 1908 when alumni expressed their concerns about the “Gates of Hell” not being suitable for our campus anymore. The archway, formally known as The Memorial of Kenyon’s Sons, would stand where the Gates of Hell are. On either side of the interior of the arch, there would be a bronze tablet, one reading the names of Kenyon men who fought for the Union and the other with names of those who joined the Confederacy. 

When looking at this proposal, I was reminded of the ideas that Aleida Assman discussed in “Canon and Archive.” She says this continuous forgetting process is essential to make space for information and ideas we encounter in the present and the future (Assman: 334). Assman asserts two types of forgetting and remembering: active and passive. She describes active forgetting as a group's deliberate efforts to destroy or trash memories. Active remembering refers to the “actively circulated memory” that maintains the past in our present-day lives. Passive forgetting is the non-intentional act of losing, neglecting, or abandoning a memory. Passive remembering refers to how we preserve the past as a past, like an archive. 

If Kenyon followed the proposed memorial archway plan, we would engage in the active types of remembering and forgetting discussed in Assman’s work. Kenyon would be actively forgetting as they would be destroying what we call the “Gates of Hell,” a place that holds significant meaning in the Kenyon community, not just as gates but as sites of memory where tradition and memories lie.  Furthermore, by building this archway, Kenyon would be actively remembering those we lost from our community in the Civil War. This archway would be an intentional effort to preserve the past in our present day life. This is because those would interact with this archway daily and engage with the “actively circulated memory” of members of the Kenyon community who took part in the Civil War.





Assman, Aleida. 2011. “From: ‘Canon and Archive’.” Pp. 334-37 in The Collective Memory Reader, Edited by J.K. Olick, V. Vinitzky-Seroussi, and D. Levy. New York: Oxford University Press.

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