RECONSIDERATION OF Memorials and Monuments
TRANSFORM AND EXPAND THE WAY YOUR HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS ARE VIEWED, ACCESSED AND UTILIZED. AND LET YOUR HISTORY INFORM THE FUTURE.
www.historyit.com
Contents
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AUTUMN 2016 VOLUME 71, #4
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32 PAGE
20 Departments 3 On Doing Local History By Carol Kammen
5 The Whole is Greater By Dina Bailey
32 Award Winner Spotlight By Terri Blanchette
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Features
ON THE COVER In 2002, the
7 Reconsideration of Memorials and Monuments
State of Colorado reinterpreted its
By Modupe Labode
original Civil War
12 Fighting Civil Rights and the Cold War: Confederate Monuments at Gettysburg
include a plaque
monument to acknowledging the Sand Creek
By Jill Ogline Titus
Massacre. From
20 Finding Meaning in Monuments: Atlanta History Center Enters Dialogue on Confederate Symbols By F. Sheffield Hale
34 Book Reviews
26 Redefining History and Heritage at Virginia’s Colleges and Universities
By Bonnie Stacy and Elizabeth P. Stewart
By Kelley Fanto Deetz, Bradley Lynn Coleman, Jody Allen, and
1909-2002, Sand Creek was listed among “Battles and Engagements” in which Coloradans fought during the war. Photo Max van Balgooy INSIDE: TECHNICAL LEAFLET
How to Make a Podcast By Marieke Van Damme and Dan Yaeger
Thomas E. Camden
History News is a publication of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). History News exists to foster publication, scholarly research, and an open forum for discussion of best practices, applicable theories, and professional experiences pertinent to the field of state and local history. THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL HISTORY
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From the Editor
s keepers of community history and memory, history organizations provide contemporary context. It’s one of our most important roles, and one of the seven core values of history: “By bringing history into discussions about contemporary issues, we can better understand the origins of and multiple perspectives on the challenges facing our communities and nation.” The remembered past through public monuments provides an opportunity to “clarify misperceptions, reveal complexities, temper volatile viewpoints, open people to new possibilities, and lead to more effective solutions for today’s challenges.”1 This History News highlights considerations about monuments of the Civil War era. I can think of no other event in American history whose memory is as hotly contested. As communities continue to grapple with the war’s legacies, they are turning their attention to its public memorials. This, in turn, brings to the fore conversations about the motives of those who created them. Simply, they are not artifacts of 1861-1865 but are instead a reflection of the specific time period in which they were erected. This is an important distinction, one our organizations can help make. Other questions follow. Does leaving them in situ officially sanction the activities of the honoree(s)? Does displacement allow future generations to gloss over the negative aspects of the past—with these very public reminders gone? How does removing these monuments affect preservation of the built environment? And what
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role should history institutions play in discussions of what to do? Charlie Bryan, President and CEO Emeritus of the Virginia Historical Society, provided an answer to the latter. The best historians are revisionists, he wrote, “looking at familiar subjects from unique perspectives to come up with new ways of describing the past.”2 Monuments and memorials offer an opportunity for history organizations to do just this, while also educating the public about the processes of our discipline. There is no prescriptive answer, but moments like these are where we can provide one of our most valuable services: a convener of dialog about how history impacts the present. This entire conversation ultimately comes down to the issue of relevance. And relevant history is inclusive history. This is something Dina Bailey discusses in the inaugural entry of a new quarterly History News column, “The Whole is Greater.” We are grateful to Dina for being our first contributor to this feature.
Bob Beatty 1 History Relevance Campaign, “The Value of History: Seven Ways it is Essential,” www.historyrelevance.com/value-statement. 2 Charles F. Bryan, Jr., Imperfect Past: History in a New Light (ManakinSabot, VA: Dementi Milestone Publishing, Inc., 2015), 126-127.
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On Doing Local History >
By Carol Kammen
Encounters with History
I
n the fall of 2015 our public library announced Encountering History, a series of meetings to be held the second Thursday of the month at noon. The library would supply coffee and cookies. I was the announced organizer. Just about everyone who showed up that first day expected me to lecture. Which is exactly what I did not want to do. I explained that what I hoped for was a discussion, an exploration, an examination of a local document that we would read aloud and then probe. My interest in this was not to teach a particular subject but to engage the group with the practice of history. Had I announced just that however—“Come Practice History”—I am sure no one would have come! The practice of history is just too awful a name to put on what we did and what happened. I tried to explain what I thought might happen and then explained that I had no idea what would happen, because after we read the document aloud, what occurred would be up to what each of them saw in the material, how they looked at and considered it. In other words, this was not a lecture, but a seminar; there were no right answers as long as the information in the document was not violated. I was there to give context when needed, or to talk about subjects that came up, also as needed. Twelve people attended our first event. They were mostly people unknown to me. Some were elderly, but several were working people on their lunch hour. There were two university professors. They looked skeptical but friendly. What I was setting up mirrored a shift in higher education that occurred in the last third of the nineteenth century. Until that time, many universities followed a strict curriculum in which every student studied the exact same program, using the same books, moving in the same progression, with the expectation that a lecturer would deliver the lesson and students would regurgitate it in the form of answers to questions or on a test. Some universities discarded this sort of education in favor of education that engaged the student and empowered everyone in the classroom to explore the
subject. My university called this sort of dynamic teaching “seminaries.” In addition to sitting around a table and talking about the topic at hand, instructors encouraged students to use the library, the laboratory, and the world around them to gather empirical information. Thus, while the instructor/professor came with a topic and materials in hand, he—and it was generally a he in those days—invited the students to join in the investigation and discussion. This is what I hoped to do in our public library program. I had no certainty this was like Field of Dreams, that anyone would come to Encountering History. But a number did come and I am thankful they did. The first day, I handed out a sheet of paper that listed the findings at a nearby archaeological site. The list included dogs buried with men; sewing awls with older females; a few elderly burials; infants who died at or near birth whose bodies were unaccompanied by grave objects; and young adolescents with gendered tools—arrows for young boys, awls for the girls. We read the list aloud, each taking a sentence. I explained there is little other evidence about these hunter-gatherers and participants could offer any possibility that did not contradict the evidence on the page. From here and there around the table, people began to offer suggestions about the evidence and what it might indicate. Although I have read more than most of those in attendance about this burial site, the evidence was engaging and people began to probe. Why were there burials on this island? Did the evidence indicate a belief system of some sort, perhaps suggesting that there was a belief in an afterlife when these items might be needed? How did the evidence show gender differences? I tried to supply as little information as possible but encouraged discussion, allowing the group to monitor itself. “That doesn’t make sense,” one said. Another observed something else on the list inconsistent with the facts that I had provided. I left considering this first session a success. There were different faces at our second meeting. Some from the first group
returned, some brought friends. This was the pattern that emerged over the year, with different people coming and going as suited their schedule. I devoted the second session to a fragment of a letter written in 1848 from a wife to her husband living and working in a city thirty miles away. Around the edges of the paper she had written, “Burn This, Burn This.” That caught everyone’s attention. What Calista Hall was writing to her husband Pliny had to do with the birth of a child to a family nearby where she went to help out, noting quietly that this family already had a sufficiency of children, and perhaps Pliny could take Mr. Stewart “behind the barn and learn him.” “History at school was not like this,” observed one as the group dug in to understand what Calista wrote about. They pondered her exact situation and that of her neighbor. The group discussed why (and how) limiting the number of children in the family was negotiated and why it was seen as necessary. Participants enjoyed learning about Calista, and how she fit into the perceptible drop in the number of children born to white women over the course of the nineteenth century. They would not forget Calista, they reported. This was another success, the creation of a very powerful connection with the past. At the next session, with some returning and some new people joining us, we used maps from the Revolutionary War era (when the Iroquois peoples were displaced from the area) to understand the history of land distribution in our area of the state. Along with the maps, I offered a letter from an early settler and a comment by an Iroquois about what the loss of his land meant. A month later, we tackled a four-page letter written in the 1820s—four days before the death of the author. She related the history of her life, the many moves her family had made to the frontier and around in it, her three husbands, and advice she was leaving for her family. Her life had not been easy, but her faith had been strong. The letter was indeed cautionary. “Don’t forget you come from HISTORY NEWS
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On Doing Local History > ‘good’ and once important people, and don’t pile up worldly goods in preference to worshipping God,” Mary Ann Elderkin Clark Jackson advised. We read court records of a murder trial and listened to the testimony of the children who had been at the breakfast table when their father axed their mother in the head. This led to a discussion of murder, about women’s employment in the nineteenth century, of executions as public spectacles, and about justice. In these and later sessions, participants needn’t have remembered any single important historical fact; no historical observation emerged that would have helped on an exam or standardized test. The sessions were all about engaging with material, asking questions of it, making sense of what was before us, and finding context. The sessions were also about hearing words from another era spoken out loud. Participants didn’t necessarily learn about local history but instead had the opportunity to engage in thinking about history. They deliberated the meaning of documents and their interpretation—for there were a number of times when participants saw things differently from each other. They discussed the importance of leaving evidence of their own lives for the future and how to accomplish it. There was no way I could structure these sessions or have a particular goal
for any of them other than that of engagement, for that was what I wanted. I brought in materials and asked what people could make of them: what else they thought they needed to know, how these documents spoke to them, what they heard. Part of the experience was reading the materials aloud. We heard different voices give life to the words on the page. We heard the inflections each reader made, noticed the changing meaning of some words, and were surprised to read old words that sometimes seemed quite modern. Our last session was a reading of the Declaration of Sentiments, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. As we went around the table reading the document, participants raised their eyebrows and nodded heads in agreement. (That it was a session of seven women most certainly contributed to their appreciation of the document.) “How radical!” exclaimed one. “Fascinating,” said another. “How timely,” observed a third. We discussed the fact that it took seventy-two more years before Congress granted women the right to vote and that only one person at the 1848 convention lived long enough to cast her ballot. This engagement with the past is something any history organization could take on. The documents can be local or regional or even national, although most people seem to find the local docu-
ments particularly interesting. The cost was minimal: a copy machine, a seminar room, and some coffee. We sat and talked. We listened to each other. We thought through the words expressed through the ages. Of course we had problems similar to most public programs. We never knew how many would appear for a session, and faces changed over time. On a bad weather day, few came. Conversely, if the weather was too good, they might have been gardening. Most participants were women. My expectations were only that I had someone with whom to tackle the past. I didn’t get paid, but you could not pay me enough to match my joy as someone realized a point, explained a sentence, or searched for an answer! And not all questions were answered, which is a lesson in itself. From my experience, this is the most exciting way there is of teaching. Sometimes the simplest things are the best. That was the case with Encountering History. No one in the room could forget Calista Hall and the letter that obviously was so difficult for her to write. She noted she was putting “all the privacy on this sheet” and that her husband was to burn it. Everyone at that session of Encountering History was so grateful that he hadn’t. t “On Doing Local History” is intended to encourage dialogue on the essential issues of local history. Carol Kammen can be reached at ckk6@cornell.edu.
AASLH acknowledges and appreciates these Institutional Partners and Patrons for their extraordinary support: Patron Members $250+ Bob Beatty Franklin, TN Pamela J. Bennett Indianapolis, IN Ellsworth Brown Madison, WI Georgianna Contiguglia Denver, CO Karen Cooper Minneapolis, MN John R. Dichtl Nashville, TN Stephen Elliott St. Paul, MN Leigh A. Grinstead Denver, CO Lori Gundlach Fairview Park, OH John Herbst Indianapolis, IN Jeff Hirsch Philadelphia, PA Lynne Ireland Lincoln, NE
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Trevor Jones Frankfort, KY Katherine Kane Hartford, CT Thomas A. Mason Indianapolis, IN Jean Svandlenak Kansas City, MO Richard E. Turley Salt Lake City, UT Bev Tyler Setauket, NY Tobi Voigt Detroit, MI Robert Wolz Key West, FL
Institutional Partners $1,000+ Alabama Department of Archives and History Montgomery, AL Arizona Historical Society Tucson, AZ Atlanta History Center Atlanta, GA Belle Meade Plantation Nashville, TN Billings Farm & Museum Woodstock, VT Bullock Texas State History Museum Austin, TX Cincinnati Museum Center Cincinnati, OH Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Williamsburg, VA Conner Prairie Fishers, IN First Division Museum at Cantigny Wheaton, IL Florida Division of Historical Resources Tallahassee, FL Hagley Museum & Library Wilmington, DE Historic Ford Estates Grosse Pointe Shores, MI Historic House Trust of New York City New York, NY
Historic New England Boston, MA HISTORY New York, NY History Colorado Denver, CO Idaho State Historical Society Boise, ID Indiana Historical Society Indianapolis, IN Indiana State Museum & Historic Sites Corporation Indianapolis, IN Kentucky Historical Society Frankfort, KY Massachusetts Historical Society Boston, MA Michigan Historical Center Lansing, MI Minnesota Historical Society St. Paul, MN Missouri History Museum St. Louis, MO Museum of History and Industry Seattle, WA Nantucket Historical Association Nantucket, MA National Trust for Historic Preservation Washington, DC Nebraska State Historical Society Lincoln, NE
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The Whole is Greater >
By Dina Bailey
Fostering Empathy The Olympic ideal of every country is sending its best to compete in a spirit of good will—yeah, it’s not going to end war, it’s not going to eliminate poverty or some of the tragedies that we see every day—but, it builds a sense of common humanity, a sense of empathy.
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—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
love the Olympics. I become obsessed. And this past summer I was able to deeply indulge in this obsession. Some people may see the Olympics as a pastime, a diversion. Even David Feherty, an NBC sports reporter, said something similar at the beginning of his video segment that then went on to describe the true importance of the Olympics. Through sixteen days of intense competition, I saw the spectrum of sportsmanship—I burst with pride for each gold, silver, and bronze medalist. I shed a tear with those who were so close and those who “just” made a valiant effort. And I cringed with embarrassment when an athlete who was supposed to be representing his or her country acted disgracefully. Every Olympics I come away with the same feeling; the modern Olympic Games are supposed to bring the world closer together, even if for only a short time. Now, I admit, the Games are not perfect. For example, politics are visible in which athletes are allowed to represent their country (gender), which individuals can afford to attend to watch or play (economics), and which statements or actions lead to nods of approval or requests for asylum. The Olympics are richer, more beautiful, and more meaningful because of their complexity. As President Obama said in an interview over the summer, the Olympics build “a sense of common humanity, a sense of empathy.”1 Building empathy is fundamental to celebrating our nation’s diversity and
actively fostering inclusion in our lives— both personally and professionally. As we increasingly become global citizens, fostering empathy has become an essential component of not only international relations, but daily interactions. As a field, I believe that we want our institutions to be safe havens where individuals can immerse themselves in dialogues, experiences, and knowledge attainment in order to use the relevance of history to become more comfortable in a world that seems to be getting ever smaller and more complicated. That said, some of us are more comfortable with this vision than others; and that’s okay. I turned to consulting for just this reason, to support organizations who want to move in this direction, but don’t quite know how. In my career I have focused on change management. I have worked with organizations to embrace strategic initiatives that lead to more diverse and inclusive communities. I’ve written chapters about how to engage empathy to empower everyone, how to build community involvement plans, and how we (as institutions) need to continue our commitment to courage, cooperation, and perseverance because we know that if you understand history, you can change your present and transform your future. Fostering empathy (and therefore, diversity and inclusion) can’t just be about a few programs a year or acknowledging empathy as a value in an annual report. I’ve been fortunate to work in institutions that are relatively new and are still working through their identities, missions, and scopes. While all of our institutions have growing pains no matter the age, size, or location, my time with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (the Freedom Center) in Cincinnati and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (the Center) in Atlanta led me to admire contemporary missions and their potential to focus on fostering empathy across every aspect of the institution. The Freedom Center’s mission is to “reveal stories of freedom’s heroes, from the era of the underground railroad to contemporary times, chal-
lenging and inspiring everyone to take courageous steps of freedom today.” The Center’s mission is to “empower people to take the protection of every human’s rights personally.” Largely because of these contemporary missions, I have honed my passion, experience, and skill set to embrace the principles of empathy, diversity, and inclusion. I want everyone to be able to internalize their missions like I have.2 Another example of a powerful mission belongs to the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), an institution established in 1849. Its mission centers on “Using the Power of History to Transform Lives.” It uses the foundational principles of history organizations: preserving, sharing, and connecting to emphasize sustainability, stewardship, and
BUILDING EMPATHY IS
fundamental TO CELEBRATING OUR NATION’S
diversity AND ACTIVELY FOSTERING inclusion IN OUR LIVES—BOTH PERSONALLY AND PROFESSIONALLY.
innovation. And in terms of promoting diversity and inclusion, MNHS must be congratulated for promoting Chris Taylor as its Chief Inclusion Officer. In this new role, Taylor’s work encompasses a systems approach to change management. He and his team, he writes, “Work across all functions of MNHS, providing inclusive programming, developing authentic and sustainable relationships with diverse communities, increasing the cultural competency of staff at MNHS through creating learning and development opportunities, and working to create a more diverse staff at all levels of MNHS through recruitment and retention activities.”3 HISTORY NEWS
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The Whole is Greater > T H E A M E R I C A N A S S O C I AT I O N F O R S TAT E A N D L O C A L H I S T O RY Acknowledges and appreciates these Endowment Donors for their extraordinary support: Dr. William T. Alderson Society
Friends of the Endowment Society
$50,000+
$5,000 – $9,999
Ms. Sylvia Alderson Winston–Salem, NC
Atlanta History Center Atlanta, GA
Anonymous
Mr. Rick Beard New York, NY
Mr. John Frisbee (Deceased) Concord, NH National Endowment for the Humanities Washington, DC Mr. Dennis & Ms. Trudy O’Toole Monticello, NM
AASLH President’s Society
Mr. & Mrs. Salvatore Cilella Atlanta, GA Mr. David Crosson & Ms. Natalie Hala San Francisco, CA Ms. Terry L. Davis Nashville, TN
Maryland Historical Society Baltimore, MD Missouri History Museum St. Louis, MO Ms. Candace Tangorra Matelic Pawleys Island, SC Ms. Kathleen S. & Mr. James L. Mullins Grosse Pointe Shores, MI National Heritage Museum Lexington, MA Nebraska State Historical Society Lincoln, NE Ms. Laura Roberts & Mr. Edward Belove Cambridge, MA
$10,000 – $49,999
Mr. John & Ms. Anita Durel Baltimore, MD
Mr. Edward P. Alexander (Deceased) Washington, DC
Mr. Stephen Elliott St. Paul, MN
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Williamsburg, VA
Mr. Dennis Fiori Boston, MA
The J. Paul Getty Trust Los Angeles, CA
Mr. Leslie H. Fishel (Deceased) Madison, WI
Mr. & Mrs. Charles F. Bryan Jr. Richmond, VA
Mr. Jim & Ms. Janet Vaughan Washington, DC
Ms. Barbara Franco Harrisburg, PA
Ms. Sandra Sageser Clark Holt, MI
Mr. George L. Vogt Portland, OR
Mr. James B. Gardner Washington, DC
HISTORY New York, NY
Ms. Jeanne & Mr. Bill Watson Orinda, CA
Historic Annapolis Foundation Annapolis, MD
Martha-Ellen Tye Foundation Marshalltown, IA
Indiana Historical Society Indianapolis, IN
Rowman & Littlefield Lanham, MD Ms. Ruby Rogers Cincinnati, OH
This article is only the beginning of a History News column discussing the importance of weaving diversity and inclusion throughout all that we do in our work. In embracing empathy, we will further promote these critical principles across the field. This starts with a serious look at each mission, because it is the heart of the institution. While I don’t expect our next gathering will include races and an Olympic flame, I look forward to celebrating a common humanity, a common empathy with you. t Dina Bailey is the CEO of Mountain Top Vision, LLC. She serves on the AASLH Council, the board of the Association of African American Museums, and the board of Next Generation Men. Dina can be reached at dina@ mountaintopvisionllc.com. She also tweets from @DinaABailey with a focus on human rights. 1 Josephine B. Yurcaba, “President Obama’s Quote about the Olympics Beautifully Captured Their Spirit and Importance,” Romper, August 3, 2016. 2 National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, www.freedomcenter.org; and National Center for Civil and Human Rights, www.civilandhumanrights.org. 3 Minnesota Historical Society, www.mnhs.org/about; and Chris Taylor, go.aaslh.org/ChrisTaylor.
AASLH thanks the following individuals for their leadership as members of the AASLH Legacy Society. The Legacy Society provides AASLH members an opportunity to donate to the endowment via estate planning.
Ms. Sylvia Alderson Winston–Salem, NC Anonymous Mr. Bob & Ms. Candy Beatty Franklin, TN Mr. Robert M. & Ms. Claudia H. Brown Missoula, MT Mr. & Mrs. Charles F. Bryan Jr. Richmond, VA Ms. Linda Caldwell Etowah, TN Ms. Mary Case & Mr. Will Lowe Washington, DC Ms. Terry L. Davis Nashville, TN Mr. Stephen & Ms. Diane Elliott St. Paul, MN Mr. John Frisbee (Deceased) Concord, NH Mr. J. Kevin Graffagnino Barre, VT
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Mr. John A. Herbst Indianapolis, IN Mr. H. G. Jones Chapel Hill, NC Ms. Katherine Kane West Hartford, CT Ms. Kathleen S. & Mr. James L. Mullins Grosse Pointe Shores, MI Mr. Dennis A. O’Toole Monticello, NM Ms. Ruby Rogers Cincinnati, OH Mr. David J. Russo Ontario, Canada Mr. Will Ticknor Las Cruces, NM Mr. Jim & Ms. Janet Vaughan Washington, DC Mr. George L. Vogt Portland, OR
RECONSIDERATION of
Memorials and Monuments
The Jasper, Alabama, chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated this monument in 1907. In 2016, Alabama’s legislators considered a bill that would have banned cities from removing historic monuments without state permission, but the measure failed to become a law. Jet Lowe, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
C
B y M odupe L abode
ommunities throughout the United States are in the midst of a widespread reconsideration of symbols of the Confederacy and white supremacy. The murder of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015 is the most immediate cause of this scrutiny, but the national discussion of race and violence that emerged in response to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown has also led communities to examine monuments. The debates over Confederate statues and symbols are concentrated in the South, but are also occurring in places like Harvard Law School, which recently removed a shield honoring the slaveholding Royall family. Although some people
may regard the vehement arguments over these symbols and the calls for removal of monuments as a new part of twentyfirst-century life, protests over the display of Confederate monuments and emblems go back decades.1 This issue of History News features three articles, each offering perspectives on the history and present-day legacy of the symbols and history of slavery and the Confederacy. Jill Ogline Titus discusses the history of Confederate memorials on the Gettysburg battlefield. F. Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center, describes the sophisticated, user-friendly toolkit that his staff developed to help organizations and individuals interpret monuments to the Confederacy. Finally, Kelley Fanto Deetz, Bradley Lynn Coleman, Jody Allen, and Thomas E. Camden describe the work of a coalition of colleges and universities recognizing their fundamental connections to slavery and commemorating the lives of enslaved people who lived and worked at these institutions. HISTORY NEWS
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Daughters of the Confederacy sponsored monuments in towns and cities throughout the region. Scholars Kirk Savage and John Winberry have documented that, over time, the preferred site for these monuments shifted from cemeteries to civic spaces such as parks and courthouse squares. These obelisks, plaques, and statues not only honored individuals or common soldiers, but also asserted that the values for which the Confederacy fought, including white supremacy, had not been defeated. This monument building was part of a social, political, and cultural movement that celebrated the Lost Cause in official and popular culture.2 In the late 1800s and early 1900s, anyone would have understood the connection between a Confederate statue and the ongoing economic, legal, social, and political subordination of African Americans. Racial violence, in the form of lynching, racial cleansing, and everyday harassment, enforced this social order through terror. In addition to Confederate monuments, southerners created monuments overtly celebrating white supremacy, such as the commemoration of the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place, in which the White League led a coup against a New Orleans government made up of white and African American men. A subset of monuments placed before World War II focused on the “faithful slave” or free black individual who presumably allied with aristocratic whites. One of the most notorious of these monuments is the “Good Darky” statue of a deferential black man tipping his hat to passersby, which stood for decades in Natchitoches, Louisiana.3 After World War II, protesters challenging Jim Crow confronted segregationists who embraced symbols of the Confederacy, particularly the Confederate battle flag, to signal opposition to African American civil rights. From the 1970s, civil rights activists and supporters began promoting monuments, street names, and plaques to commemorate the struggle, African American history, and sites associated with slavery and lynching.4 Architectural historian Dell Upton argues that even as African Americans in the South gained political and economic strength, powerful whites have retained the ability
There are Confederate monuments even in states that fought for the North. This 1901 monument in Monroe County, West Virginia, was dedicated to “men who served the lost cause.”
T
hese articles provide examples of how museums and cultural institutions are engaging with the history of slavery and monuments to the Confederacy, but they do not provide a one-size-fitsCarol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress all template for communities grappling with this issue. Such a tool cannot exist, in large part because each community discussing these monuments must engage with both the local historical context and larger historical trends. Because the discussions of Confederate monuments are local and engage with interpretations of the past, institutions concerned with local and state history could be involved in their communities as they contend with these issues. Yet many history organizations appear to be uncertain about what they should do or say about these monuments or have opted to maintain official silence, fearing that any statement could alienate local politicians, donors, friends, and neighbors. Silence, however, often speaks volumes. This introduction provides a brief overview of how these Confederate monuments came to be placed in the landscape and then discusses strategies used in the recent past to respond to criticism of these monuments. Ideally, museums and museum workers can use these articles and resources to deepen the discussion of Confederate symbols in their communities. Memorials honoring Confederate soldiers and generals began appearing in the South during the latter part of the nineteenth century as organizations such as the United
Origin of the Lost Cause Narrative n the spring of 1865, large swaths of the former Confederate states lay in ruins. Four years of war had left its economy at a standstill and roughly four million slaves freed. Within a short period of time, white southerners commenced with the difficult task of reconstructing their lives and rebuilding their society. That included justifying the hefty toll of the war and on the South and the rest of the world. Edward A. Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner, introduced the term “Lost Cause” in 1866 in his book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Although it never followed anything close to an official playbook, this Lost Cause narrative quickly coalesced around a certain set of assumptions about the war, including its causes and consequences. Among
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By Kevin M. Levin
other things, Lost Cause writers insisted the southern loss on the battlefield was due to the overwhelming resources of the North and not the failure of its generals or the wavering support of southern enlisted men and its broader populace. Lost Cause writers deified Generals Lee and Jackson and Confederate soldiers as embodying the virtues of bravery, sacrifice, and Christian morality. Slavery, they argued, was not a negative, but benefited the black race; it functioned as the foundation of a peaceful society before the war, a culture that stood far superior to the violent, industrial North. Therefore, African Americans showed unwavering support for the Confederacy through the very end of the war. In contrast to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who spoke for many when he argued early in the war that slavery constituted the
to force many memorials focusing on African American history to conform to their tastes, often muting the message of these monuments. As monuments commemorating the Civil Rights Movement started changing the landscape, the historical markers, monuments, and other memorials to the Confederacy came under increasing scrutiny. Today’s proposals to alter Confederate symbols in public spaces draw on strategies that have developed over decades: alteration, reinterpretation, creating new monuments, removal, and doing nothing. Many communities have used several strategies over the years. These alternatives, it is important to note, are not exhaustive strategies for engaging with Confederate memorials.5 Altering a Confederate monument has the potential to make profound changes in its meaning. In Tennessee, the Maury County African American Heritage Society and the Genealogical Society of Maury County led the effort to add the names of county residents who fought for the Union to the local war memorial. A ceremony in 2013 dedicated a stone slab engraved with the names of fifty-four African American men who served in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and four white men who fought for the Union. Many of the men who served in the USCT had been enslaved and were fighting to end slavery and ensure the permanent freedom of their families. Newspaper reports do not reveal the process by which this remarkable project occurred. The simple listing of names may prompt viewers to reconsider their previous ideas about who fought in the Civil War and their motivations.6 Reinterpretation of monuments, through reading rails or plaques, allows the original monument to be preserved. Ideally, the viewer is able to develop a complex interpretation of the monument, but also of memorialization more generally. Qualitative evaluation would help historians understand whether or not the plaques are achieving this goal. If the reinterpretation is conducted in collaboration with people who have divergent positions on the monument, the project itself may provide an opportunity for discussion and, potentially, understanding.
“cornerstone” of the South’s new government, Lost Cause writers now insisted that the southern states seceded not in defense of slavery, but in solidarity with the states’ rights cause. Women took the early lead in commemorating the Lost Cause by decorating Confederate graves. These activities led to the formation of ladies’ memorial associations throughout the South and served as a foundation for the larger United Daughters of the Confederacy organized later in the century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Lost Cause was the dominant narrative of the Civil War in the South and served as the backdrop for the rise of Jim Crow segregation and the dedication of numerous monuments in states across the former Confederacy, including Kentucky and Maryland, which never seceded from the Union. Veterans’ reunions and monument dedications helped to pass on the Lost Cause narrative to a new generation.
A plaque dedicated in 2002 reinterpreted the Civil War Monument in Denver, Colorado, which originally described the Sand Creek Massacre as a battle.
Ari Kelman and Kenneth Foote have analyzed what they consider to be the successful reinterpretation of a Union monument that describes the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre—in which Colorado Territory troops attacked a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people and killed more Max van Balgooy than 150 individuals—as a Civil War battle. (Full disclosure: I had a small part in the process of reinterpreting this monument.) Several factors made this reinterpretation possible: the cultural and moral authority of Cheyenne and Arapaho representatives, many of whom had relatives killed in the massacre; the willingness of these nations to be officially involved in reinterpreting the monument; the widespread consensus among non-indigenous power brokers that the Sand Creek Massacre was indefensible; and the marginal standing of those who sought to minimize the massacre. Comparable factors may not exist in many communities seeking to reinterpret Confederate monuments.7 Installing a new monument to contextualize or counter Confederate monuments is another strategy. Many commemorations of the Civil Rights Movement have been placed near Confederate memorials. Dell Upton calls this practice “dual heritage.” Although such placement means civil rights monuments are in prominent, familiar locations, Upton argues that this strategy conveys the message that the civil rights struggles are equivalent to the Confederacy. Several monuments successfully avoid this form of equivalency, honor people victimized by white supremacy, and convey the power and complexity of the civil rights struggle. A short list of
The Lost Cause also resonated outside the South, as evidenced by the success of the 1939 Hollywood screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. The characters of “Mammy” and “Pork,” along with scenes of loyal slaves before and during the war as well as loyal ex-slaves during Reconstruction, point to the Lost Cause’s strong hold on American memory. The current debate about the public display of Confederate iconography attests to the Lost Cause’s hold on the nation’s collective memory of the Civil War. Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. He is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder and is currently working on Searching for Black Confederate Soldiers: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press. You can find him online at cwmemory.com.
Monument to Confederate Soldiers and Sailors of Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama
Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress
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such monuments includes: Maya Lin’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama; the commemoration complex in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park; and the Clayton Jackson McGhie memorial in Duluth, Minnesota, that honors three African American men murdered by a lynch mob.8 Demands to remove monuments bring up fundamental questions about the purpose of commemoration. Should monuments in public spaces represent ideal community values? If these values are no longer acceptable, what should happen to the monuments? Many involved in public history or historic preservation recoil from proposals to remove these memorials, concerned about what will be lost if the monuments are moved. Protesters calling for the removal of these memorials emphasize that they take these symbols of white supremacy seriously and highlight the harm they experience when they encounter such monuments in their daily lives. Some protesters suggest memorials be placed in less prominent locations or in museums. Historian Aleia Brown, writing about the Confederate battle flag, raises concerns about the ability of many museums to provide adequate interpretation of this racially charged object. Her concerns also apply to interpretation of these monuments. In his blog, Kirk Savage has suggested that if monuments are removed, an empty column should remain, to remind viewers of what the public had renounced.9 Confronting Confederate symbols and memorials is a complex task in part because an honest discussion requires grap-
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pling with important issues that cannot be easily articulated, let alone resolved. How are race, identity, and history intertwined? What does the symbolic and historic Confederacy mean, both in the South and in the nation? What roles should museums and cultural organizations play in determining what communities should preserve and how the past should be interpreted? Some people worry that discussing these issues causes racial dissent. However, it is important to recognize that these conversations are already occurring in private or semiprivate spaces, from living rooms to Facebook, and are already affecting people’s public actions and statements. Museums can choose whether or not to engage in the community discussion, but they should begin these discussions within their own walls. The ability of museums to preserve, care for, and interpret the contentious past is dependent upon these discussions. Many museum workers have complicated relationships to the history of slavery and the Confederacy, which they are reluctant to discuss with their coworkers, or anyone outside of their families. Yet, without honest engagement with the difficult past represented by Confederate symbols, the ability of history museums to engage in their core mission—interpreting the past—will be compromised. Modupe Labode is an associate professor of history and museum studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Before working at IUPUI, she was the state historian at the Colorado Historical Society. Throughout
her career as a practitioner and academic-based public historian, she has worked with historical markers and other forms of interpretation. She is currently researching Fred Wilson’s proposed work of public art, E Pluribus Unum, which was to be a reinterpretation of the figure of a freed African American on the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument. She can be reached at mlabode@iupui.edu.
Resources: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, docsouth.unc.edu/ commland. Foote, Kenneth E., Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Revised Edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Kelman, Ari. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Southern Poverty Law Center. “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” 2016, available at go.aaslh.org/SPLCforHN. 1 Harvard Law Today, “Law School Committee Recommends Retiring Current Shield,” Harvard Law Today, March 4, 2016; Harvard Law School Library, Ask a Librarian! “Q. What Are the Origins of the Harvard Law School Shield that Was Retired in 2016?” 2 Jonathan Leib and Gerald Webster, “On Remembering John Winberry and the Study of Confederate Monuments on the Southern Landscape,” Southeastern Geographer 55, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 8-18; Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 3 Joan Marie Johnson, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone’: African American Women’s Clubs, the Frederick Douglass Home, and the Black Mammy Monument,’”
Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 1 (2005): 62-86. The city removed this statue, often called “Uncle Jack,” from public view in the 1960s, and the Louisiana State University Rural Life Museum eventually acquired it. Over the years, the museum has struggled with where to place the object and how to interpret it. See: “Uncle Jack Statue,” Louisiana Regional Folklife Program, go.aaslh.org/UncleJackStatue; Adam Duvernay, “Statue of Black Man Has History of Controversy,” LSU Now, October 6, 2009; Fiona Handley, “Memorializing Race in the Deep South: The ‘Good Darkie’ Statue, Louisiana, USA,” Public Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2007): 98-115. 4 Richard Schein’s article describes how a historical marker about the sale of enslaved people in Lexington, Kentucky, changes the meaning of a space previously dominated by statues focusing on the Confederacy. Richard H. Schein, “A Methodological Framework for Interpreting Ordinary Landscapes: Lexington, Kentucky’s Courthouse Square,” Geographical Review 99, no. 3 (July 2009): 377-402. For efforts to commemorate the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, Julie Buckner Armstrong, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); The Mary Turner Project, www.maryturner.org; and the Georgia Historical Society marker commemorating the site where Turner was murdered: go.aaslh.org/GHSMaryTurner. 5 Owen J. Dwyer and Derek Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College, 2008). 6 “58 Maury Civil War Soldiers Added to Monument,” Columbia Daily Herald, October 19, 2013. 7 Kenneth E. Foote, “Editing Memory and Automobility and Race: Two Learning Activities on Contested Heritage and Place,” Southeastern Geographer 53, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 384-97; Ari Kelman, “For Liberty and Empire: Remembering Sand Creek, Rethinking the Civil War,” Common-Place 14, no. 2 (Winter 2014). 8 Dell Upton, What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). For the Duluth memorial, see Erika Doss, Monument Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, Inc. www.claytonjacksonmcghie.org. 9 Derek H. Alderman and Owen J. Dwyer, “A Primer on the Geography of Memory: The Site and Situation of Commemorative Landscapes,” Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, 2012; Aleia Brown, “The Confederate Flag Doesn’t Belong in a Museum,” Slate.com, June 25, 2015; Kirk Savage, “What to Do with Confederate Monuments,” November 15, 2015.
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HISTORY NEWS
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Fighting Civil Rights and the Cold War:
Confederate Monuments at Gettysburg By Jill Ogline Titus
I
t’s been interesting and instructive to see the ongoing debate over Confederate iconography unfold from the vantage point of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s premier centers of Civil War memory. Many of the conversations
taking place in town are similar to ones happening around the country, but a few elements have been noteworthy. In Gettysburg, flag debates have by and large revolved around First Amendment rights, honoring ancestors and their cause, and the demands of heritage tourism, and not around civic identity or the appropriateness of the flag’s use as a symbol of the state. But interestingly enough, monuments, which we have in abundance in Gettysburg,
High Water Mark of the Confederacy, Hancock Avenue, Gettysburg National Military Park
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The Virginia Memorial dominates the landscape along Seminary Ridge, shaping visitors’ perceptions of the assault popularly known as Pickett’s Charge.
Library Of Congress Prints And Photographs Division
have only infrequently factored into the discussion. The main reason for this is because the vast majority of our Confederate monuments aren’t located in traditional civic spaces like courthouse lawns or town squares. They’re on the battlefield, on land preserved for its historical and commemorative significance. I’ve had my ear to the ground on this, and as far I know, there have been no significant calls for removal of any battlefield monuments, or even demands for broad-scale contextualization, new signage, or reinterpretation. But that doesn’t mean that we should do nothing. As we all know, “ownership” of historical symbols such as monuments is a complicated topic. They have many stakeholders—ranging from the descendants of the people who erected them to the people who walk past them every day. A monument that fills some with a sense of pride and belonging can stir in others feelings of anger, hurt, and humiliation. As historians, we know monuments are powerful teaching tools. When read not as timeless symbols but as artifacts of the period in which they were dedicated, they have much to tell us about the complex and sometimes contradictory motivations of previous generations. Confederate monuments help us understand the scope and power of the Lost Cause interpretation of the war, and the myriad ways that Confederate heritage has been mobilized over generations to institutionalize and defend white supremacy. But does educational worth trump all of the arguments for removal? Does the fact that a monument can help us
Courtesy Bob Bea tty
Miranda Harple
A mid-twentieth century postcard features Gettysburg statues of Union Generals John Buford and John Reynolds.
understand something important about our history mean that members of a present-day local community surrounding it should be required to live with it indefinitely—even if they interpret it as a symbol of oppression or a rallying point for racism? As professional historians, is it enough to just encourage dialogue, reinterpretation, and additions to the memorial landscape? And when space and funds are at a premium, shouldn’t removal be on the table as well? It seems to me that each of the conversations playing out in local communities across the nation right now is different enough that a whole range of responses can and may be appropriate. It also seems clear that so long as the principles of democracy and the ideals of the common good are
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Adams County Historical Society Library Of Congress, Prints And Photographs Division
President John F. Kennedy and his family visited the Gettysburg battlefield in 1963, three weeks after he announced his plans to send a civil rights bill to Congress.
East Cavalry Field, Confederate Cavalry Avenue, Gettysburg National Military Park. upheld, local communities and the stakeholders who interact with particular monuments on a daily basis are best situated to make the final decisions. Given the context of their placement, I don’t envision that Gettysburg’s Confederate monuments will ever be removed. They are part and parcel of both the battlefield’s historic and its commemorative landscape. But I do hope that we can find new ways to use them as springboards for conversation about the political (and personal) uses of history. Preservation of the Gettysburg battlefield began almost immediately after General Robert E. Lee’s retreat. Within a year of the battle, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial
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Association was already acquiring land. Monumentation followed quickly on the heels of land acquisition. By 1887, there were more than ninety monuments on the field. Only two were Confederate in origin. Confederate monuments didn’t begin to proliferate at Gettysburg until the first half of the twentieth century, and when they did, they generally took the form of state monuments commemorating all the troops from that state that fought in the battle. Of the eleven southern state monuments on the battlefield today, four were erected during the Civil War centennial, and two, Florida and South Carolina, were dedicated during the centennial anniversary commemoration of the battle.1 Because my research interests lie in the modern civil rights era, these centennial monuments have always gripped my attention. The two dedicated during the battle anniversary offer a uniquely effective platform for exploring, in a site-specific way, historical events that otherwise have little concrete presence on the battlefield: the connections between Civil War memory, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement. The centennial anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg took place in the midst of the tumultuous summer of 1963. That May, people across the world had been stunned by the images coming out of Birmingham, Alabama: police officers turning high-pressure fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators and ordering dogs to attack children. In June, Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in full view of his children. Also in June, Alabama governor George Wallace, who declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his infamous January 1963 inaugural speech, made his equally notorious stand in the schoolhouse door attempting to block admission of black students into the University of Alabama. Three weeks before the battle’s centennial, President John F. Kennedy had gone on national television to announce plans to send a far-reaching civil rights bill to Congress, a bill that would ultimately become known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The dedication of the monument to South Carolina troops who fought at Gettysburg took a defiantly anti-federal tone, which is unsurprising given its inscription: “That Men of Honor Might Forever Know the Responsibilities of Freedom, Dedicated South Carolinians Stood and Were Counted for Their Heritage and Convictions. Abiding Faith in the Sacredness of States Rights Provided Their Creed Here. Many Earned Eternal Glory.” This inscription was a source of friction between the National Park Service and the group that financed it, as it was very clearly a violation of Gettysburg National Military Park’s “no praise, no blame” policy on monument inscriptions. However, the extent to which the inscription contains highly charged, highly political language doesn’t register with most visitors today because people associate states’ rights so directly with the language of 1863. What gets missed is that states’ rights also had a very specific meaning in 1963, and the two dedication
Adams County Historical Society
speakers, the aforementioned Alabama governor George Wallace and Congressman John May, seized every opportunity to drive that point home.2 With its provisions forbidding states, municipalities, and business owners to engage in racial discrimination, the civil rights bill was a direct challenge to conservative concepts of states’ rights. So when John May stood at this monument in the summer of 1963 and linked the South’s right to resist “tyranny from Washington” to the Confederate cause and the Constitution, he was not only forcefully criticizing the bill but directly challenging Kennedy’s authority to propose it and Congress’s authority to pass it.3 Many white South Carolinians shared May’s views. In the weeks leading up to the dedication ceremony, a large anti-integration march at the South Carolina statehouse occurred. The courts had ruled to close all state parks in response to a federal court order to integrate them, and a black student who had successfully sued for admission to the University of South Carolina had his house fire-bombed. In inviting Wallace, the leading symbol of southern white resistance, to dedicate this monument, the group spearheading the effort made it clear that they saw a direct connection between the Confederate cause and southern resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.4 In many ways, the South Carolina monument is more a testimony to the way a group of twentieth-century segregationists wanted the world to remember their own defense of states’ rights than a tribute to the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg. But the dedication ceremony reminds us that this interpretation of states’ rights wasn’t just limited to the South. George Wallace was a celebrity during the battle anniversary. Crowds mobbed him in the lobby of the Gettysburg Hotel and trailed him around the battlefield begging him to sign their anniversary programs. Even as early as 1963, Wallace had political ambitions outside of Alabama, and he saw his trip to Gettysburg as an opportunity to begin cultivating a national political following. Standing next to this monument, Wallace argued that “South Carolina and Alabama stand for constitutional government. Millions throughout the nation look to the South to lead in the fight to restore constitutional rights and the rights of states and individuals.”5 The crowd, many of whom were not southerners, gave him a standing ovation, foreshadowing his later success on the presidential campaign trail with similar language—race-neutral on the surface, but carefully coded. The popular response to Wallace’s role in the Gettysburg commemoration challenges some of the easy North-South divisions we tend to fall into when we talk about segregation and civil rights activity. The causes Wallace fought for, limited government, states’ rights, white supremacy, and a strict interpretation of the Constitution, had national appeal in the 1960s.6 But Wallace and May did not have a monopoly on how memory of the Confederate soldiers who fought at
The South Carolina state monument, located along West Confederate Avenue, was dedicated on July 2, 1963 to the tune of a military band playing “Dixie,” Confederate flags flying, and defiant speeches from many members of the platform party. Gettysburg would be deployed during the anniversary. The group that gathered to dedicate a monument to troops from Florida the day after the South Carolina dedication interpreted the legacy of the battle quite differently. The inscription on this monument echoed the themes of courage and devotion to ideals (left undefined) that featured so prominently in the Palmetto State’s monument, and similarly violated the “no praise, no blame” policy. The Florida monument added a Cold War twist, proclaiming: “They Fought With Courage and Devotion for the Ideals In Which They Believed, By Their Noble Example of Bravery and Endurance They Enable Us to Meet With Confidence any Sacrifice Which Confronts Us As Americans.”7 HISTORY NEWS
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By 1963, it had become clear to millions of Americans that the embarrassing record of the United States regarding race relations damaged the nation’s image abroad and was becoming a liability in the battle between democracy and Communism. At the height of Cold War competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for the loyalty of non-aligned nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Soviet media channels beamed stories of voter disfranchisement and footage of beaten protesters and screaming white mobs to every corner of the world. This was a way of saying, “Don’t trust the Americans—democracy is hollow when it comes to protecting the rights of racial minorities.” The stakes were indeed high. Racial discrimination was alienating potential American allies in critical regions of the world, and if the trend continued, the consequences for the balance of power between the west and the Soviet bloc could be serious.8 The group that sponsored the placing of this monument shared these concerns about America’s image abroad with good reason. They were Floridians, residents of a state that only one year earlier had a front-row seat to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was also a major center of the aerospace industry, an industry was deeply rooted in Cold War politics. Both ordinary Floridians and the people who represented them in Congress were particularly sensitive to international politics and national security concerns. They did not want more missiles in Cuba, and they did want to do everything they could to help ensure that the U.S. would have the allies it needed to guard against Soviet expansion. In his speech at the monument’s dedication, Florida Congressman Sam Gibbons drew upon the experiences of Florida troops at Gettysburg to argue for a vision of civil rights reform profoundly shaped by foreign policy imperatives. Gibbons called on his countrymen not to squander the sacrifice made by their ancestors at Gettysburg. “The effects of the battle that we mark now with this ceremony were largely confined to this country,” he argued, “but such is not the case today; for now America’s racial conflicts have immediate worldwide significance. We cannot hope to win men’s minds in the battle with communism if America becomes a land in which freedom, equality, and opportunity are reserved only for the white man.” 9 Few NPS interpretive programs take place on this part of the Gettysburg battlefield, so visitors to this area rarely encounter these two monuments in the company of a ranger or guide. Most visitors who interact with them do so as part of the battlefield self-guided auto tour, which includes many stops along the Confederate lines on Seminary Ridge. Very little of the broader historical context is immediately obvious to anyone disembarking from a car to examine the monuments located along the road. Despite all they have to say about midcentury politics and the malleability of historical narratives, without contextual information it’s almost impossible to read beyond the surface.
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What can we, as history professionals, do to rectify this? Whenever possible, we can interrogate these spaces with visitors and students, providing the primary sources and interpretive framework necessary to contextualize these monuments. When in the area, many rangers and guides do their best to provide background context. We can also encourage contextual additions to the landscape. This coming fall, a few Gettysburg College students and I will be partnering with Gettysburg National Military Park to develop content for a contextual wayside for the South Carolina monument. We’re very excited about this opportunity to interpret the civil rights subtext of the monument and bring attention to the way the monument draws on the Civil War past to make a statement in and about the present. We could also flesh out the landscape in non-physical ways—perhaps through developing a Behind the Monuments app for the auto tour or a series of podcasts accessible from the tour loop. Another possibility (potentially more contentious than the others) could be to develop counter-monument installations challenging the perceived authority of the centennial monuments, such as an evening slideshow of images of civil rights protests in South Carolina projected across the backdrop of the monument, or an installation of the outlines of nuclear missiles in the space in front of the Florida monument. I freely admit that I’ve yet to meet anyone who wants to partner with me on the last idea, and I don’t underestimate how very difficult something like that would be to pull off. But my point is that although our contextualization efforts are beginning with an interpretive wayside, other approaches would also—at least theoretically—be possible.10 On a national scale, many of the conversations surrounding the future of Confederate monuments keep circling around to the question of whether removing some of these pieces from their current places on the landscape is tantamount to erasing history. Spatial context is certainly very important, and from a historical point of view, I believe something important does get lost in the transfer of a monument from its place in the public sphere to a museum setting. But are monuments and memorials “history” per se, or are they specific interpretations of history that were at a certain time in the past preferenced and honored enough to be etched into the landscape? Would removing them from public display really erase history itself? Christopher Phelps argued several months ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education that changes to the memorial landscape should be seen as a natural part of the constant process of historical reinterpretation and reevaluation. Phelps wrote, “Our understanding of history changes over time, often as dramatically as that history itself. To reconsider, to recast, is the essence of historical practice. It follows that altering how we present the past through commemorative symbols is not ahistorical. It is akin to what historians do.” He concluded, “To remove [symbols of overt white supremacy] does not vitiate history; on the contrary, it
represents a more thorough coming to terms with the past and its legacies, a refusal to forget.”11 While the analogy isn’t perfect, the concept of the public sphere as a form of public historiography, a landscape that should be constantly subject to the same kind of revision and reinterpretation that characterizes historical writing (within reason, given the limitations of cost, labor, and public resources) offers a way forward out of circular conversations about erasing history. t Jill Ogline Titus is Associate Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College and co-coordinator of Gettysburg’s public history minor. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and previously worked for the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College and the National Park Service. She can be reached at jtitus@gettysburg.edu. 1 Jennifer Murray, On a Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 13; Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003): 21-22, 63-64; “Veterans, Monuments, and Memory: An Introduction to the Monumentation of Gettysburg,” Hallowed Ground, Gettysburg 150 Commemorative Issue (2013).
James B. Myers, Superintendent, Gettysburg National Military Park, Letter to Payne Williams, February 15, 1963, Vertical Files Collection, Drawer 17, 2
Folder 63, Gettysburg National Military Park Library; Ronald F. Lee, Regional Director, National Park Service, Memo to NPS Director, April 11, 1963, ibid. 3
“S.C. Monument Dedicated by Gov. Russell,” Gettysburg Times, July 3, 1963.
4
Civil Rights Timeline, “Our Story Matters: Columbia SC 63.”
“S.C. Monument Dedicated by Gov. Russell,” Gettysburg Times, July 3, 1963; Robert Cook, “(Un)Furl That Banner: The Response of White Southerners to the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965,” Journal of Southern History 68, no. 4 (Nov. 2002): 908-09; Brian Matthew Jordan, “We Stand on the Same Battlefield: The Gettysburg Centenary and the Shadow of Race,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 135, No. 4 (October 2011): 500-502. 5
6
Cook, 908-09.
Kittridge A. Wing, Superintendent, Gettysburg National Military Park, Memo to Regional Director, Northeast Region, NPS, June 10, 1963, Vertical Files Collection, Drawer 17, Folder 43, Gettysburg National Military Park Library. 7
8 A rich body of literature on the relationship between the Cold War and the American Civil Rights Movement has developed over the past twenty years. See Penny von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 19371957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), among many others. 9 Transcript, Florida Gettysburg Memorial Commission Monument Dedication Ceremonies, July 3, 1963, Vertical Files Collection, Drawer 17, Folder 43, Gettysburg National Military Park Library. 10 For a full definition of counter-monuments, see James Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory: The End of the Monument in Germany,” Harvard Design Magazine, No. 9 (Fall 1999): 3. 11 Christopher Phelps, “Removing Racist Symbols Isn’t a Denial of History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 2016.
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FINDING MEANING
MONUMENTS:
IN
Atlanta History Center Enters Dialogue on Confederate Symbols B Y F. S H E F F I E L D H A L E
RECONSIDERING THE LOST CAUSE Confederate monuments have long been public reminders of the resilience of white racial supremacy. Naturally, they, as well as flags and other symbols of the Confederacy, have been the subject of controversy as a result. At the Atlanta History Center we believe these monuments can be valuable educational tools as tangible signs of the Jim Crow era. Adjacent interpretive signage and educational programming can help convert Confederate monuments into historical artifacts by
This monument of a Confederate soldier is currently stationed in front of the Douglas County Georgia Courthouse. Originally erected in downtown Douglasville, Georgia, the statue was moved to the new Courthouse in 1998.
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Atlanta History Center
talking honestly about who erected the monuments and why, and, most importantly, by telling the stories of the people monuments were intended to diminish. If all you do is read the inscriptions, it would appear that most Confederate monuments simply honor the sacrifices of brave soldiers who fought for a decentralized southern republic founded on the ideals of the Founding Fathers. There is truth in these inscriptions. But they also ignore one salient fact: the Constitution of the Confederate States of America explicitly protected African American slavery and, by logical extension, a traditional vision of the American Dream meant only for white men. Further, upon the confederacy’s defeat, nearly 39 percent of its entire population—some 3.5 million southern souls—were freed or freed themselves from bondage.2 Immediately after the war, the sense of shock and grief among many white southerners was profound. At least onefifth of all white men of military age in the Confederacy died during the war. From the 1860s through the 1880s, most monuments were erected to commemorate Confederate dead. Often placed in cemeteries, these memorials usually took the form of obelisks, arches, or fountains, often adorned with funereal drapes.3 The majority of Confederate statues in the South today are of a different character. Erected between 1890 and the 1920s, these monuments were placed in public locations— town squares, courthouse lawns, college campuses. They tend to be more elaborate and celebratory, depicting soldiers at attention or generals atop horses, and their inscriptions are usually focused more on justifying the Confederate cause than mourning its dead. An equestrian statue of a Confederate general is not an expression of personal loss.
STARTING SOMETHING
After a lifetime of involvement with the Atlanta History Center, I became its president and chief executive officer in 2012. Well aware of the ninety-year-old institution’s traditional strengths and weaknesses, my top priority has been to shake off the public’s dusty impression of the Atlanta History Center (and of history in general) and to transform it into a more welcoming place for all Atlantans. I believe the key to expanding our mission is expanding our reach—getting beyond the boundaries of our campus and showing up in places where we are least expected. I was sickened by the tragedy in Charleston in June 2015. Could this really be happening today? But, like everyone else, it also made me think. I began to see how the Atlanta History Center could make a difference in a way we had never done before. I saw a way to marry my own historic preservation experience and the center’s staff expertise and collections resources (especially Civil War collections) with the larger vision of becoming more relevant and community-driven. And as a former chairman of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation and current trustee for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, I adhere to an ethos of adaptive reuse and community engagement. All the ingredients were there to begin engaging in a broader discussion of Confederate monuments, the Lost Cause, and how history is never as simple or painless as you think. As a committed grassroots preservationist, I believe the removal of historical objects from the landscape almost always serves to diminish us and our collective story. I think it’s much better to keep these monuments. But, if we keep them, we cannot maintain the status quo. We must transform them from objects of veneration into historical artifacts that tell the story of why so many of them were erected. Quite simply, they served as a vehicle to celebrate the Confederacy during the time of Jim Crow segregation. Confederate monuments are among our last tangible links to that disturbing era in American history. Our desire to address these issues followed on the heels of the Georgia Historical Society’s success in its historic marker program, especially during the Civil War sesquicentennial commemoration. The society has filled in many gaps in public historical interpretation and formal recognition
by adding markers addressing slavery, the United States Colored Troops, the myths of Sherman’s March to the Sea, and many other topics.5 But let’s not be naïve. This is tough emotional ground where passions rule and logic hides. We dare not tackle it alone or uninformed. The first thing we did was an oldfashioned literature search, seeking out news articles, blog discussions, academic writings, and examples of similarly focused interpretive efforts. Most importantly, we talked Atlanta History Center
These monuments are the products of an era defined by Jim Crow, which affirmed a white supremacist worldview through veneration of the Lost Cause myth. As physical reflections of that mythology, monuments of this period helped to create a stronger sense of Confederate identity than had ever existed during the Civil War, all the while ignoring slavery as the war’s main cause.4 Over time, some came to view Confederate monuments as noble gestures, while others came to see the same monuments as painful reminders of America’s reestablishment of white supremacy after both northern and southern whites chose national reconciliation over racial equality in the 1870s. As a result, the present debate over Confederate monuments is a deeply personal and emotional one. It is about our ancestors, our fathers and mothers, our grandparents, and great-grandparents. And all of us have a stake in it.
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tlanta History Center President and CEO Sheffield Hale (right) standing with the last Stalin Statue in the U.S.S.R. (now Gori, Georgia), 1985. It was removed in 2010, leaving nothing but a parking lot.
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hen the historian comes to count the monuments builded [sic] to perpetuate the memories of heroes of the Confederate States, he will pause and question if his figures be really correct. He may visit other lands and make calculations as to what other peoples have done; but in the end the sentiment, the loyalty, that marks those who constituted the Confederacy stands out as the most remarkable instance of love and gratitude and devotion of which human annals give an account. —Confederate Veteran, August 1914 HISTORY NEWS
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top left: The Cecil Rhodes statue which adorns Oriel College at Oxford University. It became the subject of controversy in early 2015 as part of the larger “Rhodes Must Fall” movement. below left: The Buddhas of Bamiyan were erected in Afghanistan between the sixth and seventh centuries. Viewing them as blasphemous, the Taliban destroyed the statues in 2001. altered for a variety of reasons: from politics, to traffic congestion, to lightning strikes. A number of books catalog such monuments in certain states, but only one statewide online database exists: the University of North Carolina’s Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina website. Hence, one thing historical agencies and local communities can do to aid this effort is to simply inventory and document local monuments, however defined.7
Atlanta History Center
SEPARATING HERITAGE FROM HISTORY, AND OTHER MONUMENTAL CHALLENGES
Marco Bonavoglia (Wikimedia Commons)
with our own staff and trustees. From local and national historians we approached, we received supportive comments coupled with thoughtful suggestions. As our thinking evolved internally, we occasionally struggled to reach a consensus on how to approach the issue—and we still do. That ongoing internal and external dialogue is essential. One of the problems we encountered when we began was an astonishing lack of basic historical data. Scholarship over the last decades has been inconclusive as to the exact number of Confederate monuments that stand, where they are located, or even what constitutes a monument, a memorial, a marker, or a tablet. Renewed attention on Confederate symbols has resulted in new studies of the issue, most recently the Southern Poverty Law Center’s April 2016 report cataloguing Confederate iconography, “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy.” 6 Confederate monuments come in all shapes and sizes and are placed in all manner of locations. Some have been moved, replaced, and
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As a means of beginning the discussion—and also as a trial balloon—we created a presentation intended for local civic organizations. I started the presentation not by considering Confederate monuments per se, but by considering the fate of other supposedly permanent monuments around the world. That includes the wholesale eradication of Joseph Stalin statues in the Soviet Union (in 1985 I traveled to Stalin’s hometown of Gori, Georgia, just to see the last one), the destruction of the sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, and the relocation of monuments venerating colonial rulers in India and communist leaders in Eastern Europe into semicommemorative parks. (I prefer to call them “memorial ghettos.”) I moved on to contemporary debates, including those over Cecil Rhodes in England and South Africa, Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, and John C. Calhoun at Yale. I also tackled the heritage argument. In this parlance, heritage is “history without all the unpleasant parts.” Common expressions of heritage are St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, beer toasts at Oktoberfest in campy Bavarian theme park towns, or tossing the caber at Scottish heritage festivals. I wanted the audience to consider the ways people—including many of those who believe they are protecting Confederate heritage—so often set aside the more difficult-to-confront facts of history in favor of a more palatable narrative. We leavened the presentation with appropriate humor, an unexpected tactic when discussing the Confederacy and racial segregation. For example, when covering additive solutions to controversial monuments, I used a doctored image that had recently gained local notoriety. Etched into the granite of Stone Mountain beside Confederate leaders riding on horses was the Atlanta hip-hop duo OutKast riding in a Cadillac. We noted the ironic twist of a Ukrainian artist altering a statue of Vladimir Lenin into Darth Vader, complete with a Wi-Fi hotspot embedded in his head. Using a bit of creative animation, we also considered the hypothet-
ical removal of statues of Tom Watson, Eugene Talmadge, Richard Russell, and other Georgia leaders from the grounds of the state capitol. As they were whisked away to that great “segatory” (segregation purgatory) in the sky, only the statues of President Jimmy Carter and General John B. Gordon’s riderless horse remained. As exaggerated as some of these examples may seem, they make a serious point. A top-down cleansing of the landscape of all Confederate monuments (even if that were practical or feasible) would not cleanse our personal or collective historical palettes of their unpleasant taste. Indeed, mass removals probably would have the opposite effect. Those who defend the status quo on Confederate monuments would feel compelled to cling even harder to their uncompromising views.
EMPOWERING COMMUNITIES
Whatever solutions there are undoubtedly will emerge from well-informed local action. The Atlanta History Center’s role in this discussion is to spark a grassroots conversation, providing information and historical context to local communities so they can decide what to do with their own monuments—whether that culminates in a decision to retain, reinterpret, relocate, or remove them. As we rolled out our test-balloon, we also introduced an educational portal online (see go.aaslh.org/AHCmonuments). Its purpose is to provide historical context and to offer a place people can turn to for reliable information. The website is the cornerstone of our overall initiative, allowing us to support local conversations without coming off as an intrusive outsider. With the educational tools we provide, anyone—high school students, educators, politicians, citizens—can make informed decisions on the future of these Lost Cause vestiges. The key feature of our page is the downloadable Confederate Monument Interpretation Template that offers sample text describing the creation of these monuments and their close relationship to the Lost Cause and to Jim Crow segregation. The template also encourages communities to document and describe a given memorial’s unique history (who built it, when, unusual characteristics, etc.) within that broader context. One place to use this sample text is on reader rails—standing interpretive panels (also known as wayside markers) near and around existing monuments. This is a relatively inexpensive way to reframe a monument as something other than a voice of authority, just as putting a label in front of a museum object signals viewers to think of that object as a historical artifact. By turning monuments into artifacts, you can tell the story of their origins and varied meanings over time. QR codes on these panels and other internet linkage could connect readers to additional information. Another tool is a page dedicated to research. Here visitors can access the latest articles, blog entries, and books addressing Confederate monuments, memory, and controversies. We have also created a brief guide with tips for researching monuments, determining who exercises legal authority over them, and in general how to get started. Since its launch, the Confederate Monument Interpretation Template has become the primary draw of the monuments
webpage. In April 2016, thirty-three members of the University of Mississippi history faculty proposed borrowing text from the template to help reinterpret the most contentious monument on campus. Following much criticism of a previous attempt to contextualize the statue, the history faculty pulled language from our model to link the university’s monument to the legacy of the Civil War, the Lost Cause narrative, and the Jim Crow era. Adopting the suggestions of the history faculty and other university groups, the University of Mississippi installed the revised plaque in October 2016. The new panel informs readers that millions of enslaved people were freed as a result of the war and better explains the Lost Cause doctrine, discussing both its flawed understanding of the causes of the war and the way it was used to fight integration in the 1950s and 1960s. But as history shows, meaningful progress is controversial and often resisted. Indeed, the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans filed a lawsuit seeking the removal of the new plaque.8
ENGAGING THE MEDIA
In the past, the Atlanta History Center has rarely engaged the media as an active platform to promote public dialogue. One notable exception (presaging today’s monuments debate) was my 2013 op-ed piece for the Atlanta JournalConstitution arguing that a statue of racist Georgia legislator Tom Watson should be retained on the Georgia state capitol grounds. The position I articulated then was not so different from our institution’s position today. I advocated we shift attention from the person being venerated to the people who erected the monument and their reasons for doing so.9 Since summer 2015, we have taken any opportunity we can to speak up. From international publications such as the Economist and Time; to local newspaper, radio, and television outlets; and in websites, we have worked to stimulate community dialogue on monuments. To accompany an Atlanta Journal-Constitution column about our initiative, we produced an educational video—filmed on location in front of a towering Confederate monument in metro Atlanta—to introduce viewers to the monuments issue.10 By reaching out through the media, the History Center has been able to extend its educational reach—promoting the reexamination of monuments on a national, even international scale. The effect has been positive, prompting further requests for interviews and information. Overall, media attention has gleaned much-needed public consideration of our initiative.
IT’S WHAT WE DO
Today more than ever, history institutions have a responsibility to address the history-related issues that arise daily outside their walls. Though the Atlanta History Center rarely weighed in on contemporary issues before, we viewed the debate over Confederate monuments as one we could not ignore. Our institution has staff, collections, and knowledge to contribute to this debate. We are willing to expose ourselves to controversy, and the public (not just our usual audiences) will respect us all the more for at least speaking out, no matter how successful we are in the long run. HISTORY NEWS
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In response to simmering controversy over the conspicuously large Confederate memorial on the side of Atlanta’s Stone Mountain, Brooklyn-based artist Mack Williams suggested that the Atlanta hip-hop group OutKast be added to the carving of Confederate leaders. Mack Williams
If you install wayside markers will anybody really read them? We don’t know. But without them, we know there would be no context provided and nothing to challenge the authority of that monument. Sometimes, it’s just making the effort, being the first to step forward, that counts. And you never know where that will lead. The debate over Confederate symbols will not go away any time soon. And of course this is not the only such debate. If we as an institution are not willing to inject our resources into these debates and become involved with our communities, then who will? History has a vital place in public discourse, or it should. Without public engagement, we allow ourselves to slide toward irrelevance. No one will be asking for our help unless they know we are willing to give it. The future of public history will require historical institutions to move away from traditional comfort zones and engage more fully with local communities. So let’s concentrate on doing what we do best: use our collections, information, and expertise, as well as our willingness to engage the past in new and unexpected ways. Let’s enable communities to make informed choices about their own present and future. As public historians, it’s what we do. t F. Sheffield Hale is President and CEO of the Atlanta History Center. Prior to joining the Atlanta History Center in 2012, he served as Chief Counsel of the American Cancer Society, Inc. He can be reached at shale@atlantahistorycenter.com. 1 “The Monumental Spirit of the South,” Confederate Veteran 22, no. 8 (August 1914), 339. 2 For example: “No bill of attainder or ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed” (Article I, Section 9); “The citizens of each State . . . shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired” (Article IV, Section 2); “In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government” (Article IV, Section 3). According to the 1860 census, the total population of the eleven states that would form the Confederacy was 9,103,332, of which 3,521,110, or more than 38 percent, were enslaved. The Confederacy also recognized Kentucky and Missouri, which would bring the figures to 11,441,028 and 3,861,524, respectively, or nearly 34 percent enslaved.
This is based on estimates of approximately 620,000 military deaths. Maris A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,”
3
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Journal of American History 76, no. 1 (1989); Darroch Greer, Counting Civil War Casualties, Week-By-Week, for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (BRC Imagination Arts: Burbank, 2005); See also Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf: New York, 2008). J. David Hacker has recently estimated a total between 650,000 and 850,000; see “Recounting the Dead,” New York Times Opinionator, September 20, 2011; See examples in Gould B. Hagler, Georgia’s Confederate Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation (Mercer Press: Macon, 2014). See also J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, Ronald L. Mcninch-Su, editors Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 154-7; Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (Oxford University Press: New York, 1987), 273. 4 Martinez, et al., 59-63. See also Southern Poverty Law Center, “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” go.aaslh.org/SPLCforHN. 5 “Explore Georgia’s Historical Markers,” Georgia Historical Society, go.aaslh. org/GHSmarkers. 6 In April 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported more than 700 Confederate monuments exist in thirty-one states and the District of Columbia. Though the SPLC cataloged a broad inventory of Confederate monuments erected from the end of the Civil War to the present day, they identified two peak periods of their construction: “The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and resegregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.” See also Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (University Press of Florida: Gainesville, 2003), especially 49-72. 7 See “Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina,” docsouth.unc.edu/ commland. See also Hagler; Timothy S. Sidor, An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press 2011); and Robert S. Seigler, A Guide to Confederate Monuments in South Carolina: Passing the Cup (University of South Carolina Press: Columbia, 2012). 8 Bracey Harris, “UM History Faculty Seek Confederate Plaque Revision,” Clarion-Ledger, April 4, 2016; “UM Takes Key Steps to Address History and Context,” University of Mississippi News, June 10, 2016. After subsequent revisions, the final plaque text reads: “As Confederate veterans were dying in increasing numbers, memorial associations across the South built monuments in their memory. These monuments were often used to promote an ideology known as the ‘Lost Cause,’ which claimed that the Confederacy had been established to defend states’ rights and that slavery was not the principal cause of the Civil War. Residents of Oxford and Lafayette County dedicated this statue, approved by the university, in 1906. Although the monument was created to honor the sacrifice of local Confederate soldiers, it must also remind us that the defeat of the Confederacy actually meant freedom for millions of people. On the evening of September 30, 1962, this statue was a rallying point for opponents of integration. This historic statue is a reminder of the university’s divisive past. Today, the University of Mississippi draws from that past a continuing commitment to open its hallowed halls to all who seek truth, knowledge, and wisdom.” 9 Sheffield Hale, “We Can Learn from History,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 30, 2013. 10 “Recast in Stone,” Economist February 6-12, 2016; James C. Cobb, “Confronting the Future of New Orleans’ Confederate Past,” Time, January 14, 2016; and Gracie Bonds Staples, “Confederate Monuments: Should They Stay or Should They Go?,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 4, 2016.
Welcome to Detroit HENRY FORD ESTATE
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DEARBORN
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WWW.HENRYFORDESTATE.ORG
Where History Lives.
FROM THE HISTORIC FORD ESTATES
EDSEL & ELEANOR FORD HOUSE
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GROSSE POINTE SHORES
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WWW.FORDHOUSE.ORG
HISTORY NEWS
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Dedication of the World War II memorial at the Virginia Military Institute in 1948. The plaques at Washington Arch list the names of VMI alumni, students, and faculty killed in the war.
VMI Archives
Redefining History and Heritage at Virginia’s Colleges and Universities
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By Kelley Fanto Deetz, Bradley Lynn Coleman, Jody Allen, and Thomas E. Camden
n 2014 the Black Lives Matter movement sparked a national dialogue about race, launching the topic into the mainstream in ways not seen since the Civil Rights Movement. Racism is tightly tethered to our nation’s history and heritage, and we are in a moment where we must untangle our collective pasts in order to heal. This social movement quickly entered a conversation with public history and memorials when in 2015, activists began spray painting “Black Lives Matter” on Confederate memorials. The June 17, 2015 attack by a white terrorist on members of Charleston, South Carolina’s historic Emmanuel African Methodist
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Episcopal Church left nine African Americans dead. The shooter’s apparent connections with white supremacist ideology, and photographs of him flaunting the Confederate flag, challenged South Carolina to revisit its flying of the flag it had flown at its capitol for so long. Flashpoints such as this represent critical glimpses into the relationship between memorials and politics. Many argue that both the flag and the monuments represent “heritage not hate,” a term that is a problematic oversimplification of both our collective pasts and our memory of it. Do we remove memorials that remind us that white supremacy was sanctified by our country for centuries? When we choose to redefine moments in history, what does that leave us with now, tomorrow, and in the future when our own mistakes are criticized?
Virginia Military Institute
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four-year state military college in Lexington, Virginia, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) occupies a unique place in the Virginia system of higher education. In 2004, University of Kentucky professor John R. Thelin examined the importance of organizational saga on American college campuses. It is, he wrote, “The proposition that institutions are heirs to various historical strands.” A university’s historical saga often depends on certain shrines for enduring inspiration. After World War II, VMI revised its organizational narrative—long dominated by the American Civil War—and transformed the southern military college into a national commodity. That transformation shaped the school’s response to social, cultural, and racial changes in Virginia during the second half of the twentieth century.1 Established in 1839, the Virginia Military Institute became deeply entangled in the Civil War. The rebellion of 1861-1865 destroyed lives, demolished communities, and shattered institutions. It also freed over three million slaves in the American South. More than 1,800 VMI alumni, faculty, and staff served in the Confederate armed forces. In May 1864, the VMI corps of cadets fought in the Battle of New Market in the Shenandoah Valley. Weeks later, Union forces seized Lexington and demolished the college. After the war, southerners struggled to rebuild, redefine the meaning of freedom, and make sense of their wartime experience. In doing so, whites across the region invented the legend of the Lost Cause to explain the recent past. In Lexington, the VMI community scripted its own, deeply subjective history of the war. Virginia’s wartime governor,
John Letcher, a native of Lexington, outlined the basis of the Lost Cause narrative during a speech at the college in 1866. New Englanders caused the war, Letcher wrote, Virginians fought for “the doctrine of States’ rights,” and slavery did not figure into the decision to create the Confederacy. In the end, the Confederate States of America failed because, Letcher argued, “Her leaders and her armies have been compelled to submit to superior numbers.” “Never in the history of the world,” he added, “have leaders and men shown more heroism, more devotion, more courage, or
John Robinson Monument on North Campus, Washington and Lee University. Robinson, buried under the obelisk, bequeathed at his death in 1826 eighty-four enslaved African Americans to Washington College.
Washington and Lee University, Special Collections
As our nation is grappling with complicated notions of heritage, colleges and universities are doing the same. In February 2015 Kelley Deetz, formerly at the University of Virginia, and Jody Allen of the College of William & Mary, formed Universities Studying Slavery, a consortium dedicated to collaborative efforts among southern colleges actively dealing with history and heritage issues. Universities Studying Slavery is dedicated to starting and sustaining efforts related to these cumbersome topics with the belief that there is strength and courage in numbers. College campuses pride themselves in their rankings, famous alumni, and school spirit. These are the threads that tie history to heritage; they create a marketable identity that both entices future students and nurtures the nostalgia of alumni. Just as people tend to suppress the shameful moments in their personal pasts, colleges and universities do the same, but with more intention. Virginia’s colleges are no exception, and until recently, they chose to remain silent about histories that they deemed shameful. The following vignettes provide glimpses into three of Virginia’s oldest colleges. They showcase the efforts to acknowledge, redefine, and memorialize their complicated pasts. In the text that follows, Allen, Bradley Coleman, and Thomas Camden introduce efforts to redefine the history and heritage of their respective institutions. Their stories ask what it means to be honest about the history and heritage of a school and what is more at risk in academic settings.
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Virginia Military Institute cadets show visiting ROTC students George C. Marshall memorabilia at the VMI Museum, 1950. VMI Archives
endured greater privations and sacrifices on behalf of a cause, than the leaders and men constituting the late Confederate army.”2 Building on Letcher’s story, VMI officials instinctively placed the New Market battalion at the center of their Lost Cause narrative: noble, heroic boys fighting against overwhelming odds. Authorities recovered the remains of five cadets killed at New Market, reinterred them on campus, and began the pseudo-religious annual celebration of the battle. Then, during the 1880s, John Sergeant Wise, a cadet at New Market, introduced a novel element to the story. “At the later period of the war,” Wise wrote, “[VMI] had, I believe, the exceptional honor of having sent its corps of cadets, as a body, into battle.” The VMI community—over the strenuous objections from other southern military schools—soon translated Wise’s assertion into New Market as “the only time that the entire body of a college has fought in a pitched battle.”3 World War II shattered the Lost Cause narrative at VMI. Former VMI cadets, including U.S. Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall (Class of 1901), played a leading role in the U.S. war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Rather than honorable men vanquished in the Civil War, the new VMI story cast its graduates as victors in the largest conflict in world history. In 1946, VMI officials began collecting World War II memorabilia, mementos of their service to the nation. The VMI museum soon displayed the relics of the victors, including items donated by General Marshall. “We are enormously proud of our collection of Marshall trophies and they are of the greatest interest to visitors,” the VMI museum curator wrote. She noted “how proudly that cadets show them to their parents and friends. Such tangible evidence of greatest achievement by one who was once a cadet at VMI will have an abiding influence on these impressionable boys.” Around the same time, VMI officials dedicated a World War II memorial on campus. The two larger bronze plaques at the
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Washington Arch entrance to the cadet barracks listed the names of all VMI men killed in the Second World War.4 The tone and content of the student newspaper also changed after World War II. Before 1940, Civil War stories filled the pages of The V.M.I. Cadet. Indeed, as late as May 1940, editors dedicated four of eight pages to the Battle of New Market on the anniversary of the engagement. But coverage of the Civil War largely disappeared from the newspaper after World War II. When treated, New Market Day no longer concerned an ill-fated bid for southern independence. The power of the New Market story, a cadet wrote in 1949, concerned the broader concept of service. The student body likewise underwent a major change after World War II. Before the Second World War, students from Virginia and other southern states dominated the corps of cadets. Indeed, of the 156 members of the class of 1941, only 26 cadets hailed from states outside the South. By 1950, students came to the Virginia Military Institute from every part of the United States. Virginia aside, more students came to the college from New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey than all the other former Confederate states combined. The background and attitude of the post-World War II students severed many of the cultural connections to the old South. They had national and international interests that remade student life at the school. Then, in May 1951, VMI administrators dedicated the new entrance to the recently expanded barracks to General Marshall, one of the few Pennsylvanians to attend the school during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eight thousand people gathered in Lexington for the event. The keynote speaker, famed financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch, praised Marshall, then U.S. Secretary of Defense, as “symbolic of the new union of Americans” that “has banished forever the disunity” of the Civil War. VMI administrators added a statue of Marshall in front of the arch in 1978, a “shrine for enduring inspiration.”5 After World War II, VMI turned to Marshall and other former cadets who served in the war, placed them at the center of its historical saga, and transformed the southern military college into a national commodity with enduring long-term consequences. During the 1850s, the VMI board of visitors introduced classes in government and history to ensure that students “understand and believe [in]... that divine institution of slavery which is the basis of the happiness, prosperity and independence of our southern people, and thoroughly fortified to advocate and defend it.” Approximately 100 years later, the school produced Jonathan M. Daniels, class of 1961, a martyred civil rights worker murdered in Alabama in 1965. The story of the Virginia Military Institute shows how much depends on how communities talk about themselves.
The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation
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he story of the College of William & Mary is intriguing. Chartered by Britain’s King William and Queen Mary in 1693, the institution has a stellar public narrative. Referred to as the alma mater of a nation, the institution educated three presidents—Thomas
Stephen Salpukas
The Wren Building at the College of William & Mary, the original building that enslaved laborers built and maintained. Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Tyler. It is the home of America’s first collegiate honor code, its first law school, and Phi Beta Kappa, the first academic Greek honor society. It is certainly an august history, one many are proud of, but this is only part of the story. Indeed, 170 years of slavery and a century of Jim Crow segregation are missing from the school’s public narrative. Like many other institutions of higher education in the South, William & Mary owned or hired enslaved people from its earliest days. Blacks built and maintained the original college, now known as the Wren Building. They provided students with fresh water, three meals a day, firewood in sleeping quarters and classrooms, clean privies, and clean shoes. In 1718, the college purchased a plantation and seventeen people to work it. Called Nottoway Quarter, the college sold the tobacco produced on the plantation to provide funds for the upkeep of the campus and financial aid to students in need. Bringing these stories together is the task of The Lemon Project. Originating in 2009 with the passage of a Board of Visitors resolution, The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation is “a multifaceted and dynamic attempt to rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by the college through action or inaction.” For the last six years,
the project team has conducted important archival research uncovering the story of the African American experience at William & Mary. The team has also worked diligently to build a bridge between the college and the greater Williamsburg community of which it is a part. Finally, the project collaborates with other campus entities to foster a campus climate where all students feel welcome.6 The Lemon Project is named after a man school records refer to as “Lemon.” Researchers know little about him other than he and the college had a “complex and ambiguous relationship.” While he was owned by the college, he also sometimes acted as a vendor selling produce to the institution. Lemon was one of several slaves who received a Christmas bonus in 1808. In 1815, William & Mary gave an aging Lemon an allowance to provide his food; the college paid for his medicine in 1816. Finally, in 1817 the college purchased a coffin for Lemon. While we know very little about Lemon, we know even less about Letty, James, Charlott, Winkfield, Nanny, and Effy, some of the other enslaved people listed in the historical record. Our research has also uncovered a free black man, John Wallace de Rozarro, a landholder and native of Virginia. De Rozzaro, a very learned man, had the audacity to approach Bishop James Madison, the president of William & Mary HISTORY NEWS
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from 1777 until 1812, for permission to sit in on lectures. In a letter dated July 30, 1807, Madison wrote to a friend in Richmond about “a free black man of so uncommon a Character in Respect to Genius, and good Conduct, that I have informed him, I would take the Liberty of writing to you to know, whether he could be admitted as a Worksman or in the Armoury.” Rozarro knew how to read, write, do arithmetic, superficial and solid mensuration, and some Latin. Madison went on, “I hence thought, that the Mind of such a Man, considering the peculiar Situation of our Country, ought, if possible, to be directed into a safe Channel.” Wallace was a gunsmith by trade, which may be the reason his energies needed to be directed “into a safe channel.” Indeed, it appears de Rozarro was very accomplished at his trade. In 1806, the year before Madison’s inquiry at the armory, thirty white men submitted a petition to the York County government asking that de Rozarro be allowed to continue to ply his trade.7 As these individuals and their stories are uncovered, it is important to make sure that they have a permanent and visible place in the fabric of the school. To that end, the Lemon Project Committee on Memorialization is heading up the effort to establish a memorial to The dedication of Marshall Arch at the the enslaved and Virginia Military Institute in May 1951. free blacks who played a role in the institution’s history. As we travel along this route toward reconciliation, we are learning a good deal about the African American experience at William & Mary. What we are learning is being integrated into classes, scholarly papers, and the school’s public persona. There are undoubtedly more Lemons and more de Rozarros, along with those who labored under the burden of Jim VMI Archives Crow, to uncover. Their stories are important in understanding their lives and the legacies that linger. They show agency on the part of blacks, and sharing these stories indicates the university is willing to correct the record and make sure that all people who helped sustain this institution over the last 323 years are acknowledged in the public realm.
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A Difficult, Yet Undeniable, History
I
n 1749 the Scots-Irish pioneers of the Valley of Virginia founded a small classical school. In 1776, two months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the school changed its name to Liberty Hall Academy. Twenty years later, George Washington gave to the academy a generous endowment gift. Trustees expressed their gratitude to the first President of the United States by changing the name of the academy to Washington College. After the conclusion of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee accepted presidency of the college. Upon his death in 1870, the college added his name to Washington’s. The school has borne the name Washington and Lee University since. In August 2013, Washington and Lee president Kenneth P. Ruscio impaneled a special working group to explore the history of African Americans at Washington and Lee. While the university was well aware of parts of that history, Ruscio believed it should have a thorough, candid examination. In his charge to the group, Ruscio emphasized that its work should include a straightforward look at the history of enslaved people at the institution and should also identify themes, trends, and important moments up to the present. In April 2014, some members of the Board of Trustees and the president received a letter from twelve law school students expressing concerns about the climate for students of color at Washington and Lee. The mission of the special committee appointed one year earlier became more urgent. Among other things, the group created an online timeline of African Americans at the school, including the university’s involvement with slavery.8 Washington and Lee University’s involvement with slavery is a regrettable chapter of its history that must be confronted and examined. The most well-documented episode in that chapter is the 1826 bequest of eighty-four enslaved African Americans to Washington College from “Jockey” John Robinson, a prominent Rockbridge County landowner. Robinson’s estate included “all the negroes of which I may die possessed together with their increase.” His will directed these enslaved people “shall be retained, for the purposes of labour…for the space of fifty years after my decease…. At the expiration of these fifty years the trustees aforesaid are released from all restraint as to the disposal of the negroes & may sell or retain them as the results of their labour shall demonstrate to be best.”9 In 1836, ten years after Robinson’s death, the Washington College trustees broke the will and sold a large majority of these slaves to Samuel S. Garland, of Lynchburg, Virginia. During the ensuing twenty years, the college sold additional enslaved persons to local residents. Records indicate that as late as 1857, the college still owned three elderly, incapacitated people. In 2016, the university installed a historical marker recognizing the history of the enslaved men and women owned by Washington College in the nineteenth century. The marker reproduces two facsimile lists from the university’s archives. The first, from 1827, is “A list of negroes belonging to the Estate of John Robinson recd at death time” and contains the names of eighty-four men, women,
and children with their ages, appraised value, and additional details such as whether or not they had been hired out by the college to members of the Lexington community and for what amount of money. A second list, “A list of slaves belonging to Washington College,” is from July 1834 and shows that the college owned sixty-seven enslaved persons. The first half of this list includes each individual’s name, age, and “supposed value,” while the second half comprises the names of twenty-eight individuals then being hired out by the college, along with the annual income they were earning for the institution. Ruscio, Washington and Lee’s twenty-sixth president, addressed this difficult, yet undeniable, history in 2016. “At Washington and Lee we learn from the past, and this is an episode from which there is much to learn. Acknowledging the historical record—and acknowledging the contributions of those individuals—requires coming to terms with, and accepting responsibility for, a part of our past that we wish had been different, but that we cannot ignore.” As for the future, Ruscio believes strongly that the conversations will continue and that they will be fruitful only if those on all sides are willing to listen to one another with respect. In his published message to the university community in July 2014, he wrote, “I cannot imagine another institution more challenged by the complexity of history while at the same time more capable of illuminating not just our own history but the wider scope of our nation’s. Our own arc of history traces that of our nation, from the founding period through the painful divide of the Civil War and up to the present time. We cannot and should not avoid these issues. Indeed, we ought to lead in addressing them.”10
Conclusion Colleges are also often historic sites, and as such need to be responsible for the ways they tell their stories. Students gain a sense of belonging to their schools, but as people who are learning to be critically minded adults, they also need to own what it means to belong to a place and a legacy that is complex. This is harder than it seems. Colleges and universities should be places where self-reflection, critical thinking, and free speech are central to the culture. However, issues related to race tend to inspire fear at the administrative level, in alumni, and in current student populations. All of Virginia’s colleges and universities have some sort of shameful past, histories preferred left behind, unmentioned, or removed from the record. These collective efforts provide glances into the inner workings of institutions grappling with telling those stories that have been silenced for far too long; stories that run the risk of alarming and angering alumni, current students, faculty, staff, and administrators alike. We are at a point in time where not telling these stories is running a greater risk than telling them. America is at a crossroads. Political currents have inspired one of the most racially tense periods in our recent history and the Black Lives Matter movement has brought race back to the center of this country’s consciousness. Museum professionals, teachers, students, parents, and citizens have responded to this current moment in many ways. Some of us
have always thought critically about race, the history of slavery, Jim Crow, institutionalized racism, and the ways in which the past is always informing the present. It is time to confront our nation’s past, and address the legacies of slavery both in our nation as well as at the institutional level. Students need to know their school’s history in order to transform to a story that is more inclusive and honest. It is only then we will see future generations of historians and educators with the courage and confidence to tell more complete histories. t Kelley Deetz (kelleyfanto@gmail.com) is a scholar of slavery in the African Diaspora and specializes in public history and memory. She was formerly the research associate for the President’s Commission on Slavery at the university, where she founded the Universities Studying Slavery consortium. Jody L. Allen (jlalle@wm.edu), a native of Hampton, VA, earned her doctorate in U.S. history at William & Mary in 2007. She is the Director of The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and teaches in the Lyon Gardiner Tyler Department of History and the Africana Studies program at William & Mary. Bradley Lynn Coleman (colemanbl@vmi.edu) is the director of the John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History & Strategic Analysis and associate professor of history at the Virginia Military Institute. He graduated from the Virginia Military Institute, Temple University, and University of Georgia. Thomas E. Camden (camdent@wlu.edu) is an Associate Professor, Head of Special Collections & University Archives, and member of the Special Working Group Examining the Role of African Americans at Washington and Lee University. Formerly Director for Special Collections for The Library of Virginia, Camden received a B.A. from Washington and Lee University and an M.L.S from the University of Tennessee. 1 John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), xx–xxi. 2 Speech of Governor John Lecher, Lexington Gazette, September 12, 1866; reprinted in William Couper, One Hundred Years at V.M.I., 4 vols. (Richmond, VA: Garret and Massie, Inc., 1939), 3: 137-39. 3 John S. Wise, “The West Point of the Confederacy: Boys in the Battle at New Market, Virginia, May 15, 1864,” Century Magazine 37 (January 1889): 461-71; “New Market Parade Sequence (Order and Narration),” May 15, 2012, Office of the Commandant, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA. 4 Margaret Jones to George C. Marshall, March 29, 1949, Folder 24, Box 89, George C. Marshall Papers, Marshall Research Library, Lexington, VA. 5 Barnard Baruch, “Keynote Address,” May 15, 1951, Special Events, Marshall Day, Records of the Office of Communication and Marketing, Record Group 5, Virginia Military Institute Archives, J.T.L. Preston Library, Lexington, VA. 6 College of William & Mary, The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation, www.wm.edu/sites/lemonproject. 7 James Madison to William H. Cabal, Protestant Episcopal Bishops Collection, [MS 21], Yale University; copy at Swem Library, SPRC, available at go.aaslh.org/LetterW&M. 8 In August 2014, Washington and Lee removed reproduction Confederate flags from its historic Lee Chapel, returning the statue chamber to its originally intended design. For details, see “The History of the Flags in Lee Chapel and Museum,” go.aaslh.org/W&LFlags and Kenneth P. Ruscio, “A Community Conversation,” go.aaslh.org/Ruscio1. 9 Washington and Lee University Special Collections, Lexington, Virginia, Reid Family Papers. 10 Kenneth P. Ruscio, “Continuing the Community Conversation,” July 8, 2014. President’s Office, official webpage.
HISTORY NEWS
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Award Winner Spotlight >
By Terri Blanchette
The Wright Lesson
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Glencoe Historical Society
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hat happens when you add “Existing Community History” to “New/Deeper Research” and a dose of “Calculated Risk?” You get something truly noteworthy. And that’s just what Glencoe Historical Society (GHS) has done. As we all know, the new norm for most organizations in the history field are static or decreasing budgets with staff issues to match. Often the only increase has been in the challenges organizations face as they try to do more with less. The lack of funds is often a major barrier for smaller organizations that recognize the imperative to engage broader audiences, increase financial support, compete with flashier entertainment venues, and win the attention of city councils and boards. Yet, the empty (or nearly so) coffers don’t have to be the deciding factor for achieving any or all of these objectives. Glencoe Historical Society’s scalable project is a great example of how this winning equation can truly help organizations revitalize, reengage, and even potentially return to the black financially. The village of Glencoe, Illinois, is located about forty minutes north of Chicago. Nearly at the heart of this picturesque area along the north shore of Lake Michigan sits the all-volunteer organization that applied this formula in Wright in Glencoe. It was the 2016 winner of AASLH’s Leadership in History Albert B. Corey Award, which AASLH gives to volunteer-operated historical organizations that best display the qualities of vigor, scholarship, and imagination in their work.1 This ambitious venture—known as a “Special Project” in AASLH’s award parlance—combines multiple elements into one major project. It ultimately encompassed a groundbreaking exhibit, a major art project, special programming for adults and families, and a community celebration. Grand and unattainable as this project may seem on the surface, its success came to fruition using that same basic formula. The historical society and its community has long had a superficial knowl-
Street view of Glencoe Historical Society
edge of its connection to Frank Lloyd Wright, specifically in the Ravine Bluffs Development, a fifteen-acre subdivision. What was known was found in the form of seven unique homes, some concrete sculptures, and a bridge. Over the years, Wright scholars made slight mention about this Glencoe gem, but did little to uncover more. Many felt all that could be said had been said. However, the impending centennial of the subdivision brought about the idea to actively learn more of this notable connection and perhaps discover a tidbit or two to add to what had already been compiled. This became the “Existing Community History” part of the equation, and the impetus for change. Their next challenge was exactly how to maximize the opportunity. When organizations have missions to preserve and protect history as a focus, it can often become the sole effort when resources are at a minimum. In essence, goals can become hijacked by purpose. As the organization explained in its award nomination narrative, “[S]ince its founding in 1937, GHS focused largely on ‘identifying and preserving’ materials that came through our doors. Our volunteers had little time for original research.”2
With the opportunity of the upcoming centennial, the society decided to go beyond dusting off its last festival’s program and to reallocate some scarce, valuable time toward researching the materials so carefully preserved in its collection. The institution also decided to commit time to reaching out to organizations that might have kindred research materials or items for loan. This effort led to the discovery of rare documentation of not only the homes, but also about the theretofore forgotten collaboration between Wright and noted landscape architect Jens Jensen, creator of the Prairie Style of landscape architecture, which was to be featured in the Ravine Bluffs Development. Researchers also uncovered more about the man responsible for commissioning the development, Wright friend and attorney Sherman Booth Jr. This “New/Deeper Research” served as the catalyst for reengagement. The project needed one more element to fully execute the equation. It was time to be bold in putting to productive use this newfound merging of “New/Deeper Research” with “Existing Community History.” Karen Ettelson, historical society vice president, explained, “GHS vol-
unteers created a project budget (which doubled the annual GHS operating budget) [bold indeed!] and then stretched the talent of its membership even further by performing all fundraising, graphic design, web design, exhibition installation and [in-house] programming.” The key to the “Calculated Risk” aspect of the equation was to set high goals and then actively mine the resources through both membership and the community. Glencoe just so happened to have both artists and Wright architecture enthusiasts well-connected to their community. The organization took stock of these talents, and put them to use. This level of effort was certainly not easy. It required everyone to stretch his or her abilities to their fullest to cover the resources that may not be already available: marketing expertise, website or flyer design, and program development and implementation. An exciting thing then happened. While in the process of filling needs in a crowdsourced manner, the historical society exchanged their mantle of “expert” for that of “partner.” All too often, history organizations feel the need to be the sole contributor or expert in creating something history-like to push out to the public. However, it’s been proven time and again that engaging the talents of the individuals that make up your community is key in getting their eager and continuous support. As part of the project, these risk takers, a GHS committee comprising eleven of nineteen board members, raised enough money to not only cover the costs for the exhibition but also provided funds for all aspects of the programming and projects they developed—with a little to spare.
Visitors participating in Play Wright LEGO® event
West School’s entry in the public art project
Looking back, Ettelson admits that they are astounded at their accomplishment! The result was an engaging 650square-foot exhibition. It featured elements of Wright, Jensen, and Booth’s original vision for a business district and a park named Glencoe Park; information on the Ravine Bluffs Development; and the history of each of the five main Wright-designed homes. (Booth’s temporary home called “The Cottage” and his final home make up the seven homes total.) The exhibit included blueprints, photographs, and a model of a trellis that was to serve as one of the community’s focal points but was never built. Accompanying the exhibition was an impressive array of programs. At the top of the list was an exceptional, ambitious art-project-turned-fundraiser. Local artists and non-artists decorated sponsor-purchased, half-size fiberglass duplicates of the original fifteen Ravine Bluff community markers. Glencoe Historical Society featured these in a community-wide contest and later auctioned them off. Some now sit at community sites while others are history-based keepsakes in private collections. A commissioned custom LEGO® kit of a Wright-designed private train station for the community (since demolished) was the focal point of a popular family educational event. The first guided housewalk in Glencoe in more than two decades, and an eclectic series of talks by architects, historians, and homeowners rounded out the programmatic offerings. The culmination of the project included a special centennial gala celebration featuring a performance by the jazz quartet of Wright enthusiast and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Max Weinberg, drummer of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.
Visitors participating in Play Wright LEGO® event
To say this project was an amazing achievement is an understatement. But the best part is that this accomplishment serves as a model that any organization can follow in their own efforts to achieve local recognition, community and financial support. Not every historical society, archives, or museum will stumble across an undiscovered or rare item related to the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, George Washington, or even Mickey Mouse. Not every community is equally endowed when it comes to resources. However, who’s to say that, digging a little deeper, you won’t uncover a fascinating missing piece of history quietly waiting in your collection, archives, or community? What might become the story that reinvigorates your organization to reaching its full potential and then some? Put this modest formula—Existing Community History + New/Deeper Research + Calculated Risk—to work in your own organization and see what happens. As the Leadership in History Awards nomination so aptly put it, “[We] learned from Wright in Glencoe that in order to find your history, you have to go look for it, and when you do, amazing things can happen.” t Terri Blanchette is a historian and heritage preservation specialist and former Regional Chair of the AASLH Awards Committee. She has just completed her first book, a biography of Pittsburgh editorial cartoonist, Cy Hungerford. She can be reached at tblanchette@timesorters.com. 1
See about.aaslh.org/awards-types-of-awards.
All quotes from Glencoe Historical Society’s 2016 Leadership in History Awards nomination packet. 2
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Book Reviews > Collection Care: An Illustrated Handbook for the Care and Handling of Cultural Objects By Brent A Powell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), xxiv + 422 pp. Reviewed by Bonnie Stacy
B
rent A. Powell’s new handbook on collection care is both wide ranging and minutely detailed. Organized into three sections, “Overview and History,” “Guidelines and Procedures,” and “Working within Collection Environments,” the book covers a broad range of considerations that museum staff working with collections must consider as they go about their jobs, but it will be most useful once the reader has identified the task at hand and can flip to the relevant section. The “Overview and History” section introduces the field of collection care, with outlines of staff positions within museums and private companies that have
responsibility for collections, training, and safety. The author’s experience is primarily in the care and handling of art objects in organizations with staff sizes larger than those of many history organizations. But there is much to be learned here, even for staff of smaller museums with history-based collections, because such collections typically contain artwork and the care and handling of three-dimensional objects is thoroughly covered as well. The chapters devoted to two- and three-dimensional object handling contain useful distillations of complicated procedures. The bulleted lists of handling procedures for different types of material are clear and thorough. The author intended each list to be read separately; this leads to much repetition. It also means the reader can go straight to the relevant procedure without fear of missing an important step. Throughout the book, Powell is careful to point out what may be done in-house by a well-trained museum worker and what should be
referred to a professional conservator. It is good to find that the section on climate control gives an up-to-date overview of the recent reevaluation of museum climate standards. There has been much discussion lately of sustainability with regard to climate control, with an acknowledgment in the field that previous standards are probably unnecessarily stringent, resulting in a waste of financial and environmental resources. Powell provides both the old standards, still in effect in many if not most museums, and interim guidelines that are the result of the most current research in the field. This comparison allows the reader to make responsible and informed decisions on
History Beyond
the Classroom
Offering a master of arts in history with a specialization in public history Texas State University’s graduate program in public history focuses on five core areas: • archives • museums • oral history • historic preservation • local and community history Established in 1998, the program integrates public history and history course work to prepare students to engage with diverse community partners and develop new research. The Center for Texas Public History supports the program by providing opportunities to apply theoretical and methodological approaches beyond the classroom. Texas State University, to the extent not in conflict with federal or state law, prohibits discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, sex, religion, disability, veterans’ status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. Texas State University is a tobacco-free campus. 16-681 8-16
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publichistory.history.txstate.edu
conditions to strive for in both storage and exhibition settings. The author’s extensive experience teaching this subject and preparing handling manuals for museums is apparent, and the wealth of knowledge and practical understanding he has gained from this experience is obvious. One drawback, if it can be considered such, is that the book in some ways resembles a manual that has been pulled together from many sources, with much repetition and an occasional lack of cohesiveness. This is a minor point and does not affect the utility of the book, which is, overall, a useful and informative resource for new and experienced museum workers wishing to gain a practical understanding of a complex field. t Bonnie Stacy is the Chief Curator of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Edgartown, Massachusetts. She holds a M.A. in the history of decorative arts from the Bard Graduate Center and has more than twenty years of experience working with and caring for historical and art collections. She can be reached at bstacy@ mvmuseum.org.
The Art of Relevance By Nina Simon (Santa Cruz, California: Museum 2.0, 2016), 193 pp. Reviewed by Elizabeth P. Stewart
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ina Simon is an evangelist for museums and she wants us to be evangelists, too. She could not have come onto the scene at a better time. Simon has dedicated two books and her insightful Museum 2.0 blog to encouraging museum professionals to consider ways to make their institutions meaningful to new audiences. The Art of Relevance builds on her first book, The Participatory Museum, to make the case that finding ways to open the doors of museums as widely as possible not only revitalizes our institutions but can also reignite our professional passion. Simon’s work makes explicit motivations we may have taken for granted in the past. “The function of relevance is to create a connection between a person and a thing,” she writes, “in a way that might unlock meaning for that person” (137). Her book includes numerous examples of
ways that museums, theaters, and other cultural organizations are forging connections, by reaching out to new communities, building partnerships, and truly listening to those who meet those overtures with interest. She suggests museum professionals ask themselves “What do our visitors most desire? What’s in their hearts?” (107). The Art of Relevance presents real-life examples of the galvanizing results of this self-examination from Simon’s personal experiences and that of others. Two notable examples are of a Japanese American visitor for whom an archivist finds the first printed evidence of his birth in a World War II internment camp and of
HISTORY NEWS
35
Many Voices Are Stronger than One
OAH Partnership Program
Align your organization with a vibrant and diversified group of history professionals. The OAH Partnership program strives to strengthen our support of history, history education, and history practitioners. This Partnership will help you keep abreast of the latest trends in scholarship and news about and for the profession; it offers professional exposure and provides discounts on publications and services. FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT
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For 35 years OAH Distinguished Lecturers have brought the best U.S. history scholarship to audiences across the country. Let us help you: Mark the anniversaries of historic events like World War I or Reconstruction. Provide historical context for the 2016 presidential election. Explore any topic in American history. For information or to schedule a lecture
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lectures.oah.org
the community curators of the Foster Youth Museum who shared both their despair and their triumphs with the wider world for the first time. These examples are more than just good museum practice, they are truly inspiring. Museums can facilitate the process of opening a door in community-first program design, or what Simon dubs “insider-outsiders,” who adopt your institution and tell their friends and families about it. If we are fearless, she suggests, beginning the process of opening a door can ultimately result in “transformative relevance,” an invigorating and healthy reevaluation of our institutions’ traditional ways of working (173). Simon believes this transformative relevance may be the only way museums can position themselves for a new era of social purpose. But is this path open to all museums? The Art of Relevance is full of ideas for working with new communities and examples of successful initiatives, but many involve multiple staff members, years of planning and relationship development, and sophisticated training and preparation. Many smaller institutions do not have access to these resources to dedicate to any project, never mind one that may mean shifting away from ongoing projects supported by grant funders, donors, or volunteers. Simon accepts no excuses, however. On the importance of quantifiable information about communities with which you may be interested in working, she asserts, “Collecting this data may be awkward. Get over it. Figure it out” (167). For small and volunteer-led museums in particular, the path toward greater relevance will undoubtedly be paved with years of experimentation, commitment, and risk-taking. In the meantime, The Art of Relevance will serve as an important jumping-off point for these efforts to join with new communities to revitalize museums. t Elizabeth P. Stewart has been the Director of the Renton History Museum in Renton, Washington, since 2006. She has a B.A. from the University of South Carolina and a Ph.D. in American History from American University in Washington, DC. Liz is also the Vice President of the Washington Museum Association. She can be reached at estewart@rentonwa.gov.
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