The moment when National Guardsmen fired on student protestors at Kent State University on 4 May 1970 has long been understood as a key moment in the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, this event has warranted relatively scant attention in recent scholarship about the war and its legacies. Carole A. Barbato and Laura L. Davis's Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory, a collection that emerged from Kent State's 2009 Symposium on Democracy, thus marks an important step in scholars' efforts to grapple with Kent State's legacies and intersections with broader questions about post-Vietnam US culture. Drawing together the work of scholars, practitioners, and those personally impacted by the event to provide a range of intersecting perspectives, it also models the sort of collaboration that should be the hallmark of American studies scholarship.

Barbato and Davis have divided their collection into three sections, each consisting of a brief introduction and several essays; however, the concerns that each section raises resonate across the others. The first section, “From History to Humanity,” begins with Thomas Grace's essay “Kent State and Historical Memory,” which offers a detailed overview of the conflicting efforts of students, university administrators, and politicians to manage the memory of the shootings in their immediate aftermath and to determine “whether May 4 would be a battle cry for justice or simply a day for remembrance and sorrow” (9). He illustrates, for example, that while “when classes resumed in the fall of 1970 … many counted [the dead] as casualties of the Vietnam War,” within a few years the Ohio governor “watched with seeming approval as Kent State officials constructed a gymnasium annex atop much of the ground where guardsmen had faced students” and “the guardsmen have seemed rather more concerned with keeping May 4, and roles that they played in the fatalities, a closed book” (15, 18, 20). In laying out these competing, evolving, memories and silences, Grace's essay illuminates the power dynamics that enable or inhibit remembrance. This essay partners usefully with the collection's final essay, Jerry M. Lewis's “Social Remembering and Kent State,” which places on-campus commemoration within a longer perspective to argue that “tensions between honoring the dead and using the dead to advance a current cause is what is at issue in the social remembering of May 4,” and asks “what are the ethical issues of social remembering?” (187–88). Taught together with Jay Winter's keynote address that asserts that “silence … can be deployed in morally defensible and morally deplorable ways” (55), these essays would likely prompt intriguing classroom discussions.

The best essays in the second and third sections, “Corporate Media Culture and Public Memory” and “Memory, History, and Justice,” likewise use the particulars of Kent State as a springboard to discuss larger issues of remembering and civic engagement. Janet Leach and Mitch McKenney, former journalists at the Akron Beacon Journal, tend towards the celebratory in describing the paper's coverage of the shootings' thirtieth anniversary, but they offer valuable insights into the challenges that emerged for “young reporters [who] worried about their coverage being wrong or incomplete” but also “knew it would be risky if their work contradicted existing paradigms surrounding the shootings,” and raise the critical question how a changing media landscape will impact commemorative coverage (110, 114). In the final section, Renee Romano's essay comparing Kent State's remembrance to that of a violent labor dispute in Greensboro, North Carolina is perhaps the collection's strongest, as it illuminates the political concerns that shape communities' responses to violence and grapples with Lewis's fundamental question in a provocative way. Romano situates Kent State within the broader post-Vietnam moment, as does Christopher Powell's essay on Canadian responses to the shootings, which deepens understandings of Canada's relation to the Vietnam War and how much “the anti-war movement … was an international phenomenon” (42, 31).

This collection thus illuminates Kent State's history, its complicated remembrance, and its intersections with other histories of violence. Yet while it has many strengths, it is imperfect if only because some essays, despite being solid pieces of scholarship, are more loosely connected to the Kent State shootings and thus cohere less effectively with others. That said, this collection would be usefully assigned in an introductory course on public memory, as it offers a variety of perspectives on, and raises critical questions about, how Americans struggle to remember a key moment in US culture, and its essays are ones that anyone researching Vietnam's legacy, media studies, and public remembrance would do well to consult.