Jane Kamensky
President and CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Kamensky is a historian of early America and the United States, professor emerita at Harvard University, and former Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Public Memory Must Show Its Work When History Is Contested
At the Aspen Ideas Festival panel “The Architecture of Remembrance,” historians and designers argued that public memory should neither preserve comforting myths nor replace them with a single corrective story. Jane Kamensky, Walter Hood and Carol Quillen made the case that monuments, historic sites and civic landscapes should show evidence, recover erased people and places, and trust visitors to confront contradiction. Their shared premise was that remembrance is an active public practice, shaped by discovery, design and democratic process.
A Shared Civic Gospel Depends on Arguing Over Who Belongs
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Jane Kamensky, Walter Russell Mead and David French examined whether the Declaration of Independence can still serve as a shared American civic gospel in a religiously plural democracy. Kamensky argued for treating the Declaration as a usable national creed, French said its rights language gives Americans an internal standard for condemning oppression, and Mead cautioned that American identity has always rested on belonging as well as belief. The panel’s central question was not whether Americans can recite “all men are created equal,” but why they assent to it, whom it includes, and how it can be taught without becoming sectarian rule.