memorials

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• SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
  7/4/2022
  

  Philly Plan for Tubman Memorial Draws Fire: Were Black Artists Excluded?

  The city awarded a commission for a permanent statue to Wesley Wofford, who designed a traveling memorial that had graced City Hall. Local artists, many Black, argued that the call wasn't fair and open. 

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• 6/12/2022
  

  "Our Best Memorial to the Dead Would be Our Service to the Living"

  by Allison S. Finkelstein

  An overlooked cohort of American women who served in the first world war worked to establish service, instead of statuary, as a mode of memorialization. Their example offers a path out of the heated politics of commemoration. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/26/2022
  

  The Monument Controversy We Aren't Discussing

  by Cynthia C. Prescott

  Outside of the former Confederacy, efforts to replace "Pioneer Mother" statues with depictions of Native American women have sparked a backlash including outright theft.

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• 5/29/2022
  

  We Need a National Emancipation Monument at Point Comfort – Where American Slavery Began, and Began to End

  by Steven T. Corneliussen

  While parts of the site are honored as the Fort Monroe National Monument, Point Comfort should be made a national monument to emancipation. 

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  5/24/2022
  

  An Exclusive Look at the New WWI Memorial

  Sculptor Sabin Howard's ambitious design for the memorial relied on the modern power of digital photography to capture motion and the old-school forming of clay to freeze it in time. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  3/12/2022
  

  Erin Thompson's "Smashing Statues": Tear 'Em All Down

  How does taking down a statue relate to the more complicated work of eliminating the racist ideas and structures that put it up? 

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• SOURCE: Nashville Tennessean
  2/8/2022
  

  Confronting Confederate Heritage is Necessary to Understand White Supremacy

  by David Barber

  Everyday social life in the Confederacy required white Southerners to close their eyes and hearts to terrible cruelty. No reconciliation today is possible without acknowledging it. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/24/2022
  

  Post Editors: Statue or No, Teddy Roosevelt's Complex Legacy is Still with Us

  It's appropriate for Theodore Roosevelt's statue to be removed from its position as a figurehead for the Museum of Natural History, but just as appropriate for the statue to be housed in the new Roosevelt Presidential Library where TR's complicated legacy can be more fully addressed, say the Post's editorial board members.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/23/2022
  

  Confederate Groups are Keeping the Lost Cause Myth on Life Support

  by Erin L. Thompson

  "Confederate heritage" groups have used their financial resources to bring lawsuits before sympathetic judges to thwart the public's desire to remove monuments to the white supremacist pro-slavery government in public spaces. 

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• SOURCE: NPR
  1/20/2022
  

  Museum of Natural History in New York Removes Theodore Roosevelt Statue

  While Roosevelt's support of natural history has been noted, museum officials acknowledged that the statue "communicates a racial hierarchy" that constitutes a darker side of the former president's legacy.

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• SOURCE: AL.com
  1/12/2022
  

  Alabama's Capitol is a Crime Scene, with a 120 Year Coverup

  The Alabama Capitol in Montgomery was the first seat of the Confederate government and the place where white Democrats ratified a Jim Crow constitution in 1901. You'd learn little of this by touring the museum-like building. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/30/2021
  

  Richmond's Lee Statue, other Confederate Memorials Could go to Black History Museum

  Marland Buckner, interim executive director of the Black History Museum, said in the release that his institution “takes very seriously the responsibility to manage these objects in ways that ensure their origins and purpose are never forgotten: that is the glorification of those who led the fight to enslave African Americans and destroy the Union.”

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• SOURCE: Protean
  12/17/2021
  

  Dead Man Running (Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Jim Crow Blues Again)

  by Ryan Zickgraf

  Mobile's current municipal elections combined the bizarre with the bureaucratic and institutional politics of racism. 

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• SOURCE: WHYY
  12/3/2021
  

  Blair Mountain, West Virginia Still Shows the Grip of the Coal Industry

  “It was kind of weird growing up, knowing that there was a war fought here and nobody knew about it, and there’s no monuments to it,” Professor Chuck Keeney said. Others believe the story of the mine wars has been suppressed because it challenges the image of big coal as a benevolent force in the state. 

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• SOURCE: TIME
  12/7/2021
  

  Military Historian: 3 Myths about Pearl Harbor

  Rob Citino of the National World War II Museum addresses how Pearl Harbor has "lived in infamy" but not necessarily in accuracy. 

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• 12/5/2021
  

  Honoring Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre in the Age of COVID

  by Billy J. Stratton

  The community of descendants of the Sand Creek Massacre maintain rituals of healing that honor the dead while affirming bonds of community that have been tested by a long history of dispossession and the recent trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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• 12/5/2021
  

  DNA Testing Rescued Pearl Harbor's Dead from Patriotic Mythmaking

  by John Bodnar

  "When family members were asked for DNA samples and learned that long-lost loved ones might be coming home, they began to disclose to reporters aspects of the war’s legacy that had remained outside the glare of large public memorials and celebrations."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  11/9/2021
  

  Colin Powell's Funeral: A Missed Opportunity for Unity

  by Sarah J. Purcell

  Since George Washington's death in 1799, Americans have used the funerals of prominent leaders as occasions to temporarily escape growing factional and partisan division. 

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• SOURCE: Orange County Register
  11/8/2021
  

  Cal State Fullerton Students Develop Public History Archive of Confederate Monuments

  The recent movement to reconsider Confederate monuments represents a kind of synthesis of public and academic histories with a moral component, which Benjamin Cawthra encourages his public history students to investigate. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/18/2021
  

  Jefferson Statue to be Removed from NY City Council Chambers

  "Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard Law School professor and a Jefferson expert, objected to the idea of taking down the Jefferson statue, but said that if it were to move to the New-York Historical Society, where she serves as a trustee, it would be a best-case scenario."