Interpreting Race, Slavery, and United States Colored Troops at Civil War Battlefields (original) (raw)
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150th Anniversary of the American Civil War
With support by a great deal of the poor whites for the Northern cause, how did it happen that what could have been a fight for equality for Blacks after the Civil War and during the period of Reconstruction, turned into its very opposite; that is a systematic institutionalization of racism and the actual, at times and at others the metaphoric retraction of the fight for abolition and equality and thus for emancipation of Blacks in America.
The American Civil War is a watershed in United States history. One of the most important events that came from this conflict was the end of legalized enslavement of African Americans. Manassas National Battlefield Park is an excellent venue to present this history as it contains sites ranging from the period of enslavement through to the Jim Crow era. These sites record the struggle of African Americans and place the battle-related events of the civil war in historical context. The transformations that occurred within the African-American community at Manassas are discussed in this paper and should be presented at Manassas National Battlefield Park in addition to the battle events that transpired during the war’s five year history. This type of alternative history should also be presented at other Civil War battlefields across the south
Humanities 13: 153. https://doi.org/10.3390/ h13060153, 2024
The American Civil War has been commemorated with a great variety of monuments, memorials, and markers. These monuments were erected for a variety of reasons, beginning with memorialization of the fallen and later to honor aging veterans, commemoration of significant anniversaries associated with the conflict, memorialization of sites of conflict, and celebration of the actions of military leaders. Sources reveal that during both the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, many monuments were erected as part of an organized propaganda campaign to terrorize African American communities and distort the past by promoting a “Lost Cause” narrative. Through subsequent decades, to this day, complex and emotional narratives have surrounded interpretive legacies of the Civil War. Instruments of commemoration, through both physical and digital intervention approaches, can be provocative and instructive, as the country deals with a slavery legacy and the commemorated objects and spaces surrounding Confederate inheritances. Today, all of these potential factors and outcomes, with internationally relevance, are surrounded by swirls of social and political contention and controversy, including the remembering/forgetting dichotomies of cultural heritage. In this article, drawing from the testimony of scholars and artists, I address the conceptual landscape of approaches to the presentation and evolving participatory narratives of Confederate monuments that range from absolute expungement and removal to more restrained ideas such as in situ re-contextualization, removal to museums, and preservation-in-place. I stress not so much the academic debate but how the American public is informed about and reacts to the various issues related to Confederate memorialization. My main point, where my premise stands out in the literature, is that, for the sake of posterity, and our ability to connect and engage with a tangible in situ artifact, not all Confederate statues should be taken down. Some of them, or remnants of them, should be preserved as sites of conscience and reflection, with their social and political meanings ongoing and yet to be determined in the future. The modern dilemma turns on the question: In today’s new era of social justice, are these monuments primarily symbols of oppression, or can we see them, in select cases, alternatively as sites of conscience and reflection encompassing more inclusive conversations about commemoration? What we conserve and assign as the ultimate public value of these monuments rests with how we answer this question.
The Forgotten 150th: Why the Civil War Sesquicentennial is Far From Over
2016
Last spring, my friends told me that it was the perfect time to get into Civil War reenacting. “The 150th is over,” they said, “No one is going to care about the Civil War anymore, so everyone will be selling all their stuff.” Somehow, this bit of insider trading information meant more to me than just bargain brogans and frock coats. [excerpt]
Review of 'Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States Since 1865
Reviews in history, 2018
Reviewer: Jack Noe When I was a fourth grade student in suburban Birmingham, Alabama in the 1970s, the history curriculum was devoted to a study of our state. Our teacher, Mrs. Lawson, supplemented our textbook with personal recollections of the Civil War gleaned from her own grandmother, who had been a girl in the 1860s. Mrs. Lawson's tales of the terror inspired by Wilson's raiders, a Union cavalry contingent that swept through Alabama in the closing days of the war, made very clear to her impressionable charges just who the bad guys in this story were.
Is This the Fruit of Freedom?" Black Civil War Veterans in Tennessee
trace.tennessee.edu
My interest in black Civil War veterans began in a research seminar during my first semester of graduate work at Tennessee, and from the very start my advisor, Steve Ash, generously offered his time and expertise. His close reading of draft after draft (and the sacrifice of countless red pens) vastly improved the final product. Whatever progress I have made as a writer and historian is largely the result of his efforts. Throughout my time at Tennessee, Dan Feller was encouraging and enthusiastic; he, Kurt Piehler, and Asafa Jalata deserve special thanks for their service on my dissertation committee.
Studies in Social Justice, 2023
Almost 160 years after the American Civil War, where the Union defeated the Confederacy and ended slavery in the United States, approximately 1,910 tributes remain to Confederate military leaders located on public property in the 11 original Confederate states, particularly in cities with an exceptionally high density of Black residents. To Blacks, this iconography delivers a clear message of White supremacy. Six states have enacted laws to protect and preserve these memorials, making it almost impossible to use the court system to move them to private property. This paper explores connections between support for a myth called the Lost Cause, which is a revisionist history intended to spread misinformation about the true cause of the American Civil War, and attitudes toward placement of Confederate symbols on public land. We show that there is significant belief in the Lost-Cause myth among many White U.S. Southerners. Furthermore, we find those who believe most in the myth are the least likely to want to move the monuments or end taxpayer support for their maintenance. KEYWORDS social justice; White supremacy; Confederate monuments; fundamental causes theory; racism In cities across the United States, nearly 2,000 bronze, marble, aluminum, nylon, and asphalt monuments that memorialize Confederate figures, who fought to maintain slavery in the southern U.S. and lost the American Civil Living Among Confederate Icons