Guarding the memory of the National Guard: Strategies of avoidance in official historiography

Abstract

This article examines strategies employed in official state histories to avoid or “collectively forget” an unflattering past. The data comprise the textual histories presented on the websites of the US National Guard. Using content analysis and qualitative textual analysis, I find five different “strategies of avoidance” that these websites employ in their historiography: silence, thematic memory, displacement, invented tradition, and genre switching. These strategies serve to help obscure the occasionally repressive role that the National Guard has played in the history of social justice movements.