Kazimierz Pułaski alias Casimir Pulaski and His Memorial Trajectory in the Eighteenth-Century American Press
Kazimierz Pułaski alias Casimir Pulaski and His Memorial Trajectory in the Eighteenth-Century American Press

Summary/Abstract: Casimir Pulaski enjoys today the established status of a Polish-American national hero. A political refugee from his native Poland after the defeat of the Bar Confederation, he came to America in 1777, during the War of American Independence, founded the Polish Cavalry Legion, fought against the British and died in 1779 in the rank of brigadier general of the Continental Army. The present historical study in mnemonic practices is an attempt to demonstrate how American newspapers in the years 1777-1815 participated in shaping Pulaski’s image of a hero in the national memory during the formative period of the United States. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of Pulaski’s newspaper appearances in the study material showed that his media-enhanced road to prominence in the national memory followed a winding and fragmented course. Two phases of the process, separated by 14 years of complete absence of Pulaski from the American press, have been identified: 1) immediate remembrance by means of factual war reports characterized by “heroic” discourse, and 2) delayed remembrance in the form of dispersed information about the social uses of Pulaski’s name for patriotic, political and commercial purposes. Concluding, after two years of fact-based reporting as a living military hero, Pulaski’s newsworthiness declined for several years after his death. His name was subsequently recirculated in contexts pointing to the process of his myth formation in American culture as part of the foundation myth of the United States.

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