Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why

enworks. Spielvogel concludes that the Cold Harbor markers counter heroic interpretations of the war and serve as a reminder of the “downward spiral trajectory” that war often follows (151). He argues that more possibilities for interpreting history mean more possibilities for acting ethically in the present. Although this is not a completely novel insight, the analysis provides new examples of the complex connection between memory and human agency. Although Interpreting Sacred Ground makes a significant contribution, it also suffers from conceptual and editorial problems. Conceptually, the book tries to survey too much thematic territory. For instance, the study relies on two separate frameworks for interpreting the Civil War: the first foregrounds the issue of race (emancipationist vs. reconciliationist), and the second emphasizes gender. Spielvogel rather obliquely addresses the relationships between these two frameworks in a brief paragraph on the penultimate page, observing that both reconciliationist and emancipationist views can “justify the war’s violence” (158). A more explicit and sustained discussion of the relationship between these two frames would have made the study more theoretically robust and structurally cohesive. Such a discussion would have also enabled Spielvogel more clearly to explain the critical utility of his two-part analysis, which could have united the otherwise loosely linked chapters and strengthened the overall argument. In many cases, theoretical questions could have been addressed with a more explicit discussion of the author’s critical choices, as when he explained his decision to examine Cold Harbor. Why were certain aspects of a site selected rather than others? Why were these sites combined and analyzed in this particular fashion? More precise explanations of other, more specific concepts would have also improved the study. For instance, in chapter two, Spielvogel uses the terms “mimetic” and “symbolic” when describing how visitors are encouraged to engage with the past, but these concepts are not defined in context. Finally, the book contained a number of errors, such as two incorrectly numbered photographic figures (which significantly hampered Spielvogel’s analysis of Gardner’s and Brady’s photographs), inaccurate dates, and underdeveloped footnotes. Although these mistakes affected readability, in most cases they did not significantly diminish the overall effectiveness of the argument. Nonetheless, the readings within these chapters significantly enrich our understanding of how the NPS interprets the Civil War for its many visitors. Spielvogel provides close, careful rhetorical analyses, some of which model a truly innovative approach to reading multimedia memory places such as GNMP. As historical exhibits become increasingly multisensory, rhetorical scholars who study such sites will need to utilize approaches like Spielvogel’s, which attend to texts and images, videos and vistas. Spielvogel’s interpretive approach is also successful in achieving one of his underlying goals: to demonstrate the many interpretive possibilities at the disposal of the Park Service, so that it can begin to represent those possibilities for visitors. Because it addresses the ways that a powerful public institution can convey multiple perspectives on the past, Interpreting Sacred Ground stands to make the kind of dual academic– public contribution to which many rhetorical and communication scholars aspire.