| Abstract | On November 25 1783, the British evacuated New York City after occupying the city for seven-years during the American Revolution. As Washington and his troops marched into Manhattan to take command of the city, both those who fled New York, as Washington did in 1776, and those who endured the occupation joyously celebrated his return, which for them, marked the end of the Revolution. Each year from there on, the 25th of November was celebrated as a day that would later be titled Evacuation Day. This work analyzes how Evacuation Day was celebrated from 1783 to 1883. This study examines the reception to each year’s Evacuation Day celebration through a rhetorical analysis of local newspaper coverage of the event and argues that traumatic memory is very fragile and unless well-cultivated fails to transfer to from generation to generation—replaced instead with meaningless ritual and bombastic spectacle.
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