Conflicting commemorations: past and present in confederate memorialization

ABSTRACT

How do collective memory and memorialization work in divided societies? This essay takes present-day conflicts over Civil War memorialization as an opportunity to explore linkages between historical interpretations of the causes of the Civil War, attitudes toward Confederate memorials (and their removal), and modern political identities. It provides three cases of collective memorialization in one community – the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina – to shed light on physical commemoration and its possibility to invite discussion of the American racial history and the history of slavery.

KEYWORDS:

• U.S. Civil War
• confederate memorials
• political identity
• U.S. South
• American race relations
• collective memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Hahn

Barbara Hahn is an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University and the associate editor of Technology and Culture. She is the author of Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937, and, with Bruce E. Baker, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans, as well as several articles and book chapters. She is currently completing Technology and the Industrial Revolution for Cambridge University Press – research supported by a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (#628722) at the University of Leeds 2014-2016. She is also one of four collaborators on the international research project Moving Crops and the Scale of History at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.