Analyzes historical reporting of battle between General Custer’s troops & Native Americans. Historiographic background, eyewitness testimony, modern interpretations, myths, revisionism, battlefield monument.
Every year over 200,000 people visit the site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana. Long known as the Custer Battlefield National Monument, the name of the site was changed in 1991 when Congress made it the Little Bighorn National Monument and the monument to the Indians was planned. This shift in emphasis at the popular tourist attraction is the result of changes in the perception of the battle’s meanings for both Native Americans and white Americans. The change represents an outward sign of the re-thinking of history that has slowly recognized how both popular myths and supposedly objective history serve hidden agendas. Feminist and ethnic groups’ critiques of the way all kinds of history has been written have gradually produced wider recognition of the fact that these underlying interests need to be brought out in the open and…