An exhibition from the archive

The Long Black Wall

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated on the National Mall in Washington on 13 November 1982: a long black granite wall, designed by Maya Lin and chosen in a blind competition, with the names of 57,939 Americans who died in the war cut into its panels. There are now 58,220.

It became one of the great subjects of the 1980s, when interest in the war revived. Veterans’ bands sang at it and about it, families wrote songs about finding one name among the thousands, and Nashville took it to the country charts. Many of these records were made by veterans themselves, on small labels, some to raise money for veterans’ causes.