No Common Ground

No Common Ground PDF Author: Karen L. Cox
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146966268X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

No Common Ground

No Common Ground PDF Author: Karen L. Cox
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146966268X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

Monument Culture

Monument Culture PDF Author: Laura A. Macaluso
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153811416X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Monument Culture: International Perspectives on the Future of Monuments in a Changing World brings together a collection of essays from scholars and cultural critics working on the meanings of monuments and memorials in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a time of great social and political change. The book presents a broad view of the challenges facing individuals and society in making sense of public monuments with contested meanings. From the United States to Europe to Africa to Australia and New Zealand to South America and beyond, the contributors tackle the ways in which different places approach monuments in a landscape where institutions and ideas are under direct challenge from political and social unrest. It also discusses sharply changed attitudes about the representation of history and memory in the public sphere. The goal is to acknowledge shared experiences through a wider perspective; to contribute to the work of the world-wide heritage community; and to document the history and shifting cultural attitudes towards monument culture across the world, encouraging a more informed approach to monuments and their meanings especially for the public and those outside of academia.

Controversial Monuments and Memorials

Controversial Monuments and Memorials PDF Author: David B. Allison
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538173832
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
The impetus for the first edition was violent actions---the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, which was touched off by discussions about removing a statue to Robert E. Lee, and resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. Since the publication of the first edition, both history and democracy are being threatened in ways that we were only seeing small glimpses of in 2018. Today, attempts to elevate new or more complex history has been met with vilification. States across the country have passed legislation to ban critical race theory from being taught in public schools and are seeking ways to limit what teachers are allowed to teach about slavery and race in the United States. These threats are unlikely to abate. As such, our responsibility as historians, community leaders, museum professionals, and citizens is to redouble our efforts to share human stories in relatable ways and to exercise our rights and wield our power whenever and however we can. The revised edition tackles the great issues of our time against the backdrop of monument culture and historical truth.

Written in Stone

Written in Stone PDF Author: Sanford Levinson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478004347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Twentieth Anniversary Edition with a new preface and afterword From the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans in the spring of 2017 to the violent aftermath of the white nationalist march on the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville later that summer, debates and conflicts over the memorialization of Confederate “heroes” have stormed to the forefront of popular American political and cultural discourse. In Written in Stone Sanford Levinson considers the tangled responses to controversial monuments and commemorations while examining how those with political power configure public spaces in ways that shape public memory and politics. Paying particular attention to the American South, though drawing examples as well from elsewhere in the United States and throughout the world, Levinson shows how the social and legal arguments regarding the display, construction, modification, and destruction of public monuments mark the seemingly endless confrontation over the symbolism attached to public space. This twentieth anniversary edition of Written in Stone includes a new preface and an extensive afterword that takes account of recent events in cities, schools and universities, and public spaces throughout the United States and elsewhere. Twenty years on, Levinson's work is more timely and relevant than ever.

Monument Wars

Monument Wars PDF Author: Kirk Savage
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271335
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Traces the history of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., discussing its plan and structures, and considering how the concept of memorials and memorial space has changed since the nineteenth century.

Controversial Monuments and Memorials

Controversial Monuments and Memorials PDF Author: David B. Allison
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538113740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Out of the chaos and pain of Charlottesville, museum professionals, public historians, and community leaders must move quickly to face the challenges of competing historical memory, claims of heritage desecration and the ongoing scourge of racism. This book takes on the tough issues that communities across America---and analogous locales overseas---must face as white supremacy, political quagmires and visions of reconciliation with the past collide. The events of summer of 2017 that culminated in Charlottesville are outgrowths of ongoing dialogues and disputes about controversial history that encompass numerous historical situations and touch every part of US history. Strategies for working effectively with communities will be explored, and the book will delve into the ways that other countries have attempted to overcome their painful pasts. In addition, this book will highlight essays and case studies from numerous museum professionals, scholars and civic leaders as they grapple with the past they interpret for their visitors. The book will be framed by questions that help museum community leaders make sense of the competing historical narratives and political machinations that drive the current controversy around monuments and memorials--- How and when do you remove an offensive monument? Hint: It’ll take more than a screwdriver…. How can we be intentional about contextualizing the history and the motivations for building monuments for our visitors? How can communities be responsive without forsaking the historical record? Here is a guide to collective introspection, awareness of our own biases, and thoughtful community responsiveness which are the tools that will make this engagement meaningful and lasting.

Fallen Idols

Fallen Idols PDF Author: Alex von Tunzelmann
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063081695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
An Economist Best Book of the Year In this timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments, the popular historian and author of Blood and Sand explores the vital question of how a society remembers—and confronts—the past. In 2020, history came tumbling down. From the US and the UK to Belgium, New Zealand, and Bangladesh, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced, and in some cases, hauled down statues of Confederate icons, slaveholders, and imperialists. General Robert E. Lee, head of the Confederate Army, was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Edward Colston, a member of Parliament and slave trader, was knocked off his plinth in Bristol, England, and hurled into the harbor. Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled in Minnesota, burned and thrown into a lake in Virginia, and beheaded in Massachusetts. Belgian King Leopold II was set on fire in Antwerp and doused in red paint in Ghent. Winston Churchill’s monument in London was daubed with the word “racist.” As these iconic effigies fell, the backlash was swift and intense. But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. If anything, Alex von Tunzelmann reminds us, it is made. Exploring the rise and fall of twelve famous, yet now controversial statues, she takes us on a fascinating global historical tour around North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, filled with larger than life characters and dramatic stories. Von Tunzelmann reveals that statues are not historical records but political statements and distinguishes between statuary—the representation of “virtuous” individuals, usually “Great Men”—and other forms of sculpture, public art, and memorialization. Nobody wants to get rid of all memorials. But Fallen Idols asks: have statues had their day?

Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves

Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves PDF Author: Kirk Savage
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691184526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
A history of U.S. Civil War monuments that shows how they distort history and perpetuate white supremacy The United States began as a slave society, holding millions of Africans and their descendants in bondage, and remained so until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once slaves themselves. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves explores how the history of slavery and its violent end was told in public spaces—specifically in the sculptural monuments that came to dominate streets, parks, and town squares in nineteenth-century America. Looking at monuments built and unbuilt, Kirk Savage shows how the greatest era of monument building in American history took place amid struggles over race, gender, and collective memory. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves probes a host of fascinating questions and remains the only sustained investigation of post-Civil War monument building as a process of national and racial definition. Featuring a new preface by the author that reflects on recent events surrounding the meaning of these monuments, and new photography and illustrations throughout, this new and expanded edition reveals how monuments exposed the myth of a "united" people, and have only become more controversial with the passage of time.

Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments

Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments PDF Author: Erin L. Thompson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393867684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A leading expert on the past, present, and future of public monuments in America. An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? Which ones should stay up and which should come down? Who should make these decisions, and how? Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles, brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She lays bare the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, from the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol, to the fervent Klansman fired from sculpting the world’s largest Confederate monument—who went on to carve Mount Rushmore. And she explores the surprising motivations behind contemporary flashpoints, including the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol, the question of who should be represented on the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, and the decision by a museum of African American culture to display a Confederate monument removed from a public park. Written with great verve and informed by a keen sense of American history, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental questions for rebuilding not only our public landscape but our nation as a whole: Whose voices must be heard, and whose pain must remain private?

Grassroots Memorials

Grassroots Memorials PDF Author: Peter Jan Margry
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857451901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Grassroots memorials have become major areas of focus during times of trauma, danger, and social unrest. These improvised memorial assemblages continue to display new and more dynamic ways of representing collective and individual identities and in doing so reveal the steps that shape the national memories of those who struggle to come to terms with traumatic loss. This volume focuses on the hybrid quality of these temporary memorials as both monuments of mourning and as focal points for protest and expression of discontent. The broad range of case studies in this volume include anti-mafia shrines, Theo van Gogh’s memorial, September 11th memorials, March 11th shrines in Madrid, and Carlo Giuliani memorials in Genoa.