2011 Theses Master's

Grant’s Tomb An Oral History at a Commemorative Landscape

Dziedzic, Sarah E.

Grant‘s Tomb holds the bodies of Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia Dent Grant. Built in 1897 in New York City‘s Riverside Park in Morningside Heights, the tomb and the surrounding plaza are officially the General Grant National Memorial, a name change that coincided with its establishment as a National Park Service site in 1959 after a long era of management by the Grant Monument Association. It is a historic monument and a site of public history; a New York City landmark and a place of national storytelling; a nineteenth century shrine and a complex memorial that also serves the present. In this work, I consider how Grant‘s Tomb becomes a place of diverse and personal meaning endowed with the ability to transport visitors to a past that reaches back to select points of the twentieth century, to the tomb‘s construction and Grant‘s death at the end of the nineteenth century, and to the American Civil War in the 1860s.