This dissertation explores three distinct memorial sites that are frequented by tourists and that shape cultural memory through performance in the United States of America: Tombstone, Arizona; Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; and Nauvoo, Illinois. Each of these sites, I contend, is representative of influential narratives of national remembrance; each also, however, is simultaneously evidence of hidden and oppressed narratives that haunt the spaces of and performances featured at the site. Tombstone, Arizona, made famous by mediatized portrayals of the 1881 shootout at the O.K. Corral, embodies a hyper-violent romanticization of an individualistic "Wild West," but is shadowed by more communal and less aesthetic types of violence: the genocide and forced removal of American Indian tribes, the wanton eradication of wildlife, and the commodification of landscape and open space at the heart of westward expansion. Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, advertised as the United States' "Revolutionary City," is a corporatized town whose curators attempt to create a balance between historical inquiry and patriotic celebration, but often fail to address the influence and distinctiveness of past and present experiences of African American inhabitants and visitors. Finally, Nauvoo, Illinois reproduces a time of religious fervor in the history of an "American" religion, the Church of Jesus ...