Category: Memory Page 1 of 2

Besides my fascination with the mindset of slavery advocates, I’m starting to take a keen interest in Americans’ attitudes (if they have them) about the war. Again, the work of David Blight on Civil War in American Memory has been wonderfully illuminating.

I need to study more about the collective memory surrounding the “cause lost” theories, and also the morphing patriotism of Sons and Daughters Of… organizations.

Here, on the west coast, we have Highway 99. It was the original north-south highway from Canada to Mexico, subsequently replaced by Interstate 5. At one time it was the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, a designation long-since legislated away. But remnants remain, which fascinate me. A couple photos, the recent one with The AndyBear, who was five at the time. This is the marker to be found in Jefferson Davis Park, which has a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jefferson-Davis-Park/111684485552784

Reconstruction was about many things, but it’s hard to separate from the word, “legacy.” We talk about legacies in terms of current effects of past behaviors… history’s hand-me-downs. Reconstruction left legacies, of course, Jim Crow among the most prolific. One fine morning I found myself in Memphis, experiencing the irony I would later ‘anecdotalize’ on the eve of Obama’s inauguration. I share this brief story as a way of tipping my hat, in acknowledgment of the background radiation of the legacy of Reconstruction that permeates the South. https://700billionreasons.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/memphis/

I am a big fan of iTunes University, especially the many items found in the Gilder Lehrman section. The process is simple and I really don’t need to just watch someone talk… I’d much rather pop in the earbuds and get moving.

A few months ago I came across a talk by David Blight that is similar to the video on the syllabus. The talk is about the Civil War in American Memory, but the part I find most engaging comes at 17:10, when he discourses on the differences between history and memory. Some people may consider it a matter of parsing words, but he makes a great case for considering them separately and cautiously.

An immediate difference that comes to mind is the naming of the conflict itself. I grew up in Detroit, where an intrepid person can find statuary and memorials of the ‘Civil War’ and Michigan’s importance in it. I have friends my age, 47, who grew up in Tennessee, and heard nothing except of ‘The War of Northern Aggression’ and didn’t realize the South lost until they had long departed middle school.

Blight asserts that memory is “owned,” not necessarily shared. My travels in Northern Ireland and Central Europe in the mid-1990’s pointedly drove home the violent power of collective memory. What I saw were the festering, amorphous resentments of many decades of real and perceived abuse. These seventeen years later I hear Blight and I  wonder about resentment, the accumulating emotional plaque that hardened the hearts of the non-planter class in the South in the wake of the Civil War and helped make Jim Crow so widely mainstream.

I want to reread Faust and McPherson with an eye toward Blight’s points. As I do so I’ll add some asides to this, or perhaps add posts.

What follows:

1. my annotation of Blight’s talk, simply tabled to help generate talking points. I’ve quoted him directly… none of the words are mine, although I’m only as exact as the toddler in my lap will allow.

2. a screenshot of the page where the lecture can be found in iTunes.

This is all quoted as carefully as I could manage. These are David Blight’s words, not mine.Where he directly sets one point against another, I have placed them side-by-side on the table.

“Although history and memory are often conflated, keeping something separate and distinct… is valuable.

where to find this on iTunes:

Ok, this is just silly … but I had a moment and wanted to play with the Google Ngram viewer. Is it a coincidence that we are seeing both an uptick in Lincoln books at the same time books about vampires gain in popularity? … maybe Seth Grahame-Smith is onto something

Lincoln and vampires

I showed the Freedman’s Monument to my students for the first time last year. It is one of the few monuments I have been to over and over again this past year. It’s probably a mile behind the Supreme Court building and so out of the National Mall loop. I have been struggling with the monument from the moment I saw it.

Lincoln Park as seen by Google Maps.

A freedman inspired, freedman funded moment which looks more like a monument to slave trading than emancipation. The first time I saw it it looked like Lincoln was a slave trader. I haven’t been able to shake that image.

I’ve studied the Fredrick Douglass dedication speech.

I’ve read part of Lerone Bennett Jr.’s Forced Into Glory which suggests that the Proclamation ‘never freed anybody anywhere’ (quoting a reporter of Lincoln’s era). Bennett goes on to say:

“There, then the secret is out! Political history never happened. Sandburg wrote tens of thousands of words about it. Lindsay wrote a poem about it. Copeland wrote a musical portrait about it. King had a dream about it. But the fact is that Abraham Lincoln didn’t do it.” Bennett’s first chapter is here.

I’ve read Dr. Guelzo’s book on the Emancipation Proclamation and listened to both him and Dr. Pinsker and follow their logic and agree with their insights and observations.

And yet I still struggle with the monument.

I’ve come to decide that my job is to show my students the images and then shut up. Let them marinate on the messiness and realities of Reconstruction. Of politics. It helped to create a shorthand in discussions as well as a reality of the old saw about good intentions.

While researching newspapers of the Civil War, one of my student’s found this Thomas Nast drawing. I knew the moment I saw it I had to put it with the pictures of the Freedman’s Monument. A explanation of the Nast image can be found here.

My students sometimes complain that they are tired of learning about “dead people.” As a history teacher it is vital for me to help my students see the relevance. They have a misconception that history is dead along with its people. I want to teach them that “Dead people were people too.” They had emotions, cared for their families, and had opinions. And it was these people that made decisions and shaped ideas. It can be hard to teach this concept among the big ideas of war and conflicts, large social and political movements, and causes and effects in history.

As we have studied the Civil War, I have found nothing more convicting to me than my lack of focusing on the “people” of history. As we studied the images this morning, the personalities of the soldiers reminded me of the emotions that can get lost in the teaching of history. The men were not just part of the large troops or the cause of the war, they were the people that made the war worth fighting. If I use such exercises in my classroom, I can create empathy in my classroom which will intrigue my students.

From now on, I want to add a “person” component to each concept I teach. After all, “dead people were people too.”