News
Dispatches From Civil War Memory: 2005-2025 (Introduction)
1+ day, 1+ hour ago (813+ words) This project is for you. Note: Publishers interested in this project should contact me here for a formal proposal. I found myself with things to say that had no obvious outlet. Academic journals required arguments with footnotes and peer review…...
History Is What Happened. Memory Is a 22-Foot Gold Statue on a Golf Course.
2+ day, 1+ hour ago (379+ words) The statue is hard to ignore on its own terms. It stands 15 feet tall on a seven-foot marble base, covered in gold leaf paid for partly by a cryptocurrency group promoting a memecoin called $PATRIOT. A sculptor from Zanesville, Ohio,…...
Banned Books and Hoop Skirts: The Lost Cause's Last Stand
3+ day, 2+ hour ago (498+ words) The banning of Roots from Knox County school libraries is a troubling development, and it carries a particular irony given the book's deep roots in Tennessee itself. Alex Haley drew inspiration for Roots from stories he heard on the front…...
The Stories We Tell About the Civil War
3+ day, 16+ hour ago (307+ words) Civil War Memory The Stories We Tell About the Civil War How the metaphors of Civil War history shape what we see and what we don't. The physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein opens her new book The Edge of Space Time: Particles,…...
The Shifting Ground of Memory: Gettysburg and the Landscape of Tourism
5+ day, 3+ hour ago (409+ words) Gettysburg National Military Park recently announced that it will begin a 160-acre grassland restoration project along Cemetery Ridge, near the Pennsylvania Monument and the Eternal Light Peace Memorial. This multi-year project offers an important reminder that Gettysburg is not a…...
Who Gets to Decide What New Orleans Remembers?
6+ day, 2+ hour ago (663+ words) It was not a decision made lightly. It was a democratic act, rooted in the belief that public spaces belong to all residents and that honoring men who fought to preserve slavery sends a message about whose history, and whose…...
Dylann Roof's Legacy: Civil War Memory and South Carolina's Unfinished Reckoning
1+ week, 1+ hour ago (157+ words) Civil War Memory Dylann Roof's Legacy: Civil War Memory and South Carolina's Unfinished Reckoning Why South Carolina continues to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day as an official state holiday. The massacre forced an uncomfortable national spotlight onto the symbols and ceremonies…...
Defining Victory in the Summer of 1864
1+ week, 1+ day ago (375+ words) Last weekend I took part in a conference in Monterey, California that featured some of my favorite historians, including Brooks Simpson. The talk hit home for me as I find myself utterly bewildered as to what exactly we are doing…...
Alabama Has Already Lived Without the Fourteenth Amendment. Ledbetter Wants to Go Back.
1+ week, 2+ day ago (789+ words) Yesterday, Alabama's Republican House Speaker, Nathan Ledbetter, called for the overturning of the Fourteenth Amendment. It followed an emotional and contentious debate that resulted in the passage of a redistricting bill and another that authorizes a special primary election for…...
Tennessee's Redistricting Fight and the Long Shadow of the Civil War
1+ week, 3+ day ago (549+ words) When a Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones (D-Nashville) burned a printout of the Confederate flag on the floor of the state capitol yesterday, the gesture was not merely theatrical. It was a deliberate act of historical framing, an attempt to place…...