Americans Remember Their Civil War by Barbara A. Gannon

Author:Barbara A. Gannon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Five

Landscape Turned White: The Civil War In Public Memory

The day a community unveiled a Civil War monument was an important memory milestone. In one particular memorial, soldiers and a sailor were prominently featured recognizing their Civil War service; behind the sculpture, a wall listed the men who served and died in the Civil War. In many ways, this monument represented a typical example of Civil War memorialization found in cities and towns across America. The memory it serves is unique. Dedicated in 1998, the African American can Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C., recognized the almost two hundred thousand black soldiers and sailors who served in the Union army and the navy. The nation’s belated recognition of these men, almost at the war’s sesquicentennial, told you a great deal about Civil War memory, in this case, the public memory of the war. 1

The ongoing debate about the place of the Confederacy in public spaces after the Charleston shooting relates to broader memory trends discussed in earlier chapters including the contested nature of Civil War memory. John Bodnar in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992) provided a theoretical framework to explain how this affected Civil War memory. He observed that “public memory emerges from the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions.” His description of vernacular memory seemed particularly applicable to the Civil War generation’s activities that featured grassroots actions by disparate groups, in this case, Union and Confederate supporters.

African American Civil War Memorial, Washington D.C. (Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

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