For more than a century the Medal of Honor has served as a revered symbol of valor and service to the nation. In the 1990s Japanese American veterans requested a review of their service in World War II to determine whether the U.S. Army has overlooked any of their number for the award. In 1996 a team of historians began a review of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who fought in that war. Their work resulted in the award of twenty-two new Medals of Honor in June 2000. The review was also a revealing journey into the challenges of amending public memory.
Inspired by new western history, public history projects have for thirty years presented larger audiences with a sense of Western history that addresses issues of race, class, and gender. The legacy of these efforts is mixed. Public knowledge of Western history is considerably more sophisticated than it once was, although the Hollywood image of the West has proven hard to unseat. No longer youthful challengers to an educational and institutional establishment, the founders of public history and new western history entered the twenty-first century with a nuanced maturity that faces a society whose own demographics and attitudes are changing rapidly as well.
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