Americans have persistently expressed fascination with the nation's most
        famous battlefields through patriotic rhetoric, monument building, physical
        preservation, and battle reenactment. But each site is also a place where
        different groups of Americans come to compete for ownership of cherished
        national stories and to argue about the meaning of war, the importance
        of martial sacrifice, and the significance of preserving the nation's
        patriotic landscape.
      From the anniversary speeches at Lexington and Concord that shaped the
        image of the minuteman to Alamo Day speeches invoking the Texas "freedom
        fighters" of 1836 in support of the contras in Nicaragua; from passionate
        arguments over the placement of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg to
        confrontations between militant American Indian Movement and "Custer
        loyalists" during the Little Bighorn centennial in 1976; from the
        treatment of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor to continuing attempts
        to maintain the purity of these places in the face of commercialization---Sacred
        Ground details the ongoing struggles to define, control, and subvert
        patriotic faith as expressed at these ceremonial sites.