While other scholars have examined the cultural memory of difficult pasts and war memorials in the last fifteen years, White’s research stands out for the length of time he has dedicated to one site. Since 1991 he has been a participant-observer of the commemorative events at the USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, which is the burial site for most of the 1,177 sailors and marines who died there on 7 December 1941. hite has followed its transformation from a national memorial to an expansive landscape known as the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, a new entity of the National Park Service that includes submarine and aviation museums, as well as the USS Battleship Missouri Memorial. Combining history and anthropology, White dubs his approach ‘memorial ethnography’.