Thesis advisor: James O'Toole / This dissertation examines the development of historic house museums in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the present to unravel the complex relationship between public presentations of slavery and popular perceptions of the institution. In conducting the research for this project, I examined the historic and contemporary public programming at nineteen separate museums. This sample of museums includes both publicly funded and private sites in both the North and South. By bringing together a diverse group of museums, this project examines national trends alongside regional traditions as well as the role of organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and a host of private institutions in determining different interpretive foci. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Studies of postwar Germany, from 1945-1955, have concentrated on the American influence as a military occupier, the development of German reconstruction and national identity, and memory of this period from the German perspective. Within the memory analyses, firsthand accounts have been analyzed to understand the perspectives of Germans living through the postwar period. Absent from this historiography is an account of American memories and firsthand perspectives of the occupation, particularly during the 1950-1955 period. This thesis employs oral histories of American veterans stationed in postwar Germany, American propaganda and popular cultural mediums during the early 1950s, and modern historiographical trends to provide an understanding of how Americans remember the German postwar decade. American veterans remembered this period, and their encounters with local Germans, as a positive experience. These positive memories were mediated by 1950s Cold War rhetoric and propaganda and were subsequently predicated upon the men's perspective as occupying soldiers. Their recollections align with American popular memory delineating the military occupation as ending in 1949 upon the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, therefore overshadowing the 1950-1955 period of occupation. The ways in which Americans remember the postwar occupation in Germany, particularly from 1950-1955, inform broader memory and historical narrative trends of this era.