Politics of renaming a presidential memorial

The fight over renaming The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts has led to a reckoning about the meaning attached to presidential memorials and arguments about who we are. From marble monuments to cultural institutions, what do presidential memorials tell us about not only our past, but our present? For Presidents Day we decided to dig into that with one of the nation’s leading voices on memory and memorials, James E. Young, professor emeritus of English and Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@usatoday.com. 

Episode transcript available here. 

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.