Nine killed in Charleston church shooting. White supremacists demonstrate in Charlottesville. Monuments decommissioned in New Orleans and Chapel Hill. The headlines keep coming, and the debate rolls on. How should we contend with our troubled history as a nation? What is the best way forward? This first book in UGA Press's History in the Headlines series offers a rich discussion between four leading scholars who have studied the history of Confederate memory and memorialization. Through this dialogue, we see how historians explore contentious topics and provide historical context for students and the broader public. Confederate Statues and Memorialization artfully engages the past and its influence on present racial and social tensions in an accessible format for students and interested general readers. Following the conversation, the book includes a "Top Ten" set of essays and articles that everyone should read to flesh out their understanding of this contentious, sometimes violent topic. The book closes with an extended list of recommended reading, offering readers specific suggestions for pursuing other voices and points of view.

Contributions by Danielle Christmas, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Garrett Bridger Gilmore, Spencer R. Herrera, Cassandra Jackson, Stacie McCormick, Maria Seger, Randi Lynn Tanglen, Brook Thomas, Michael C. Weisenburg, and Lisa Woolfork Reading Confederate Monuments addresses the urgent and vital need for scholars, educators, and the general public to be able to read and interpret the literal and cultural Confederate monuments pervading life in the contemporary United States. The literary and cultural studies scholars featured in this collection engage many different archives and methods, demonstrating how to read literal Confederate monuments as texts and in the context of the assortment of literatures that produced and celebrated them. They further explore how to read the literary texts advancing and contesting Confederate ideology in the US cultural imaginary—then and now—as monuments in and of themselves. On top of that, the essays published here lay bare the cultural and pedagogical work of Confederate monuments and counter-monuments—divulging how and what they teach their readers as communal and yet contested narratives—thereby showing why the persistence of Confederate monuments matters greatly to local and national notions of racial justice and belonging. In doing so, this collection illustrates what critics of US literature and culture can offer to ongoing scholarly and public discussions about Confederate monuments and memory. Even as we remove, relocate, and recontextualize the physical symbols of the Confederacy dotting the US landscape, the complicated histories, cultural products, and pedagogies of Confederate ideology remain embedded in the national consciousness. To disrupt and potentially dismantle these enduring narratives alongside the statues themselves, we must be able to recognize, analyze, and resist them in US life. The pieces in this collection position us to think deeply about how and why we should continue that work.

The impetus for the first edition was violent actions---the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, which was touched off by discussions about removing a statue to Robert E. Lee, and resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. Since the publication of the first edition, both history and democracy are being threatened in ways that we were only seeing small glimpses of in 2018. Today, attempts to elevate new or more complex history has been met with vilification. States across the country have passed legislation to ban critical race theory from being taught in public schools and are seeking ways to limit what teachers are allowed to teach about slavery and race in the United States. These threats are unlikely to abate. As such, our responsibility as historians, community leaders, museum professionals, and citizens is to redouble our efforts to share human stories in relatable ways and to exercise our rights and wield our power whenever and however we can. The revised edition tackles the great issues of our time against the backdrop of monument culture and historical truth.

In December 2018, the United States Senate unanimously passed the nation’s first antilynching act, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. For the first time in US history, legislators, representing the American people, classified lynching as a federal hate crime. While lynching histories and memories have received attention among communication scholars and some interdisciplinary studies of traditional civil rights memorials exist, contemporary studies often fail to examine the politicized nature of the spaces. This volume represents the first investigation of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, both of which strategically make clear the various links between America’s history of racial terror and contemporary mass incarceration conditions, the mistreatment of juveniles, and capital punishment. Racial Terrorism: A Rhetorical Investigation of Lynching focuses on several key social agents and organizations that played vital roles in the public and legal consciousness raising that finally led to the passage of the act. Marouf A. Hasian Jr. and Nicholas S. Paliewicz argue that the advocacy of attorney Bryan Stevenson, the work of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and the efforts of curators at Montgomery’s new Legacy Museum all contributed to the formation of a rhetorical culture that set the stage at last for this hallmark lynching legislation. The authors examine how the EJI uses spaces of remembrance to confront audiences with race-conscious messages and measure to what extent those messages are successful.

In 1866, Alexander Dunlop, a free black living in Williamsburg Virginia, did three unusual things. He had an audience with the President of the United States, testified in front of the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, and he purchased a tombstone for his wife, Lucy Ann Dunlop. Purchases of this sort were rarities among Virginia’s free black community—and this particular gravestone is made more significant by Dunlop’s choice of words, his political advocacy, and the racialized rhetoric of the period. Carved by a pair of Richmond-based carvers, who like many other Southern monument makers, contributed to celebrating and mythologizing the “Lost Cause” in the wake of the Civil War, Lucy Ann’s tombstone is a powerful statement of Dunlop’s belief in the worth of all men and his hopes for the future. Buried in 1925 by the white members of a church congregation, and again in the 1960s by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the tombstone was excavated in 2003. Analysis, conservation, and long-term interpretation were undertaken by the Foundation in partnership with the community of the First Baptist Church, a historically black church within which Alexander Dunlop was a leader. “Stories in Stone: Memorialization, the Creation of History and the Role of Preservation” examines the story of the tombstone through a blend of object biography and micro-historical approaches and contrasts it with other memory projects, like the remembrance of the Civil War dead. Data from a regional survey of nineteenth-century cemeteries, historical accounts, literary sources, and the visual arts are woven together to explore the agentive relationships between monuments, their commissioners, their creators and their viewers and the ways in which memory is created and contested and how this impacts the history we learn and preserve.

Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing examines the ways in which memory furnishes important source material in the three distinct areas of critical theory, memoir, and memorial art. The book first shows how affect theorists have increasingly complemented more traditional archival research through the use of “academic memoir.” This theoretical piece is then applied to memoir works by Caribbean writers Dionne Brand and Patrick Chamoiseau, and the final case study in the book interprets as memorial art Kara Walker’s ephemeral 80,000 pound sugar sculpture of 2014. Memory as method; memory as archive; memorial as affect: this book looks at the interplay between archival sources on the one hand, and the affective memories, both personal and collective, that flow from, around, and into the constantly shifting record of the past.

A timely study, erudite and exciting, about the ordinary—and oftentimes unseen—lives of memorials Memorials are commonly studied as part of the commemorative infrastructure of modern society. Just as often, they are understood as sites of political contestation, where people battle over the meaning of events. But most of the time, they are neither. Instead, they take their rest as ordinary objects, part of the street furniture of urban life. Most memorials are “turned on” only on special days, such as Memorial Day, or at heated moments, as in August 2017, when the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville was overtaken by a political maelstrom. The rest of the time they are turned off. This book is about the everyday life of memorials. It explores their relationship to the pulses of daily life, their meaning within this quotidian context, and their place within the development of modern cities. Through Andrew Shanken’s close historical readings of memorials, both well-known and obscure, two distinct strands of scholarship are thus brought together: the study of the everyday and memory studies. From the introduction of modern memorials in the wake of the French Revolution through the recent destruction of Confederate monuments, memorials have oscillated between the everyday and the “not-everyday.” In fact, memorials have been implicated in the very structure of these categories. The Everyday Life of Memorials explores how memorials end up where they are, grow invisible, fight with traffic, get moved, are assembled into memorial zones, and are drawn anew into commemorations and political maelstroms that their original sponsors never could have imagined. Finally, exploring how people behave at memorials and what memorials ask of people reveals just how strange the commemorative infrastructure of modernity is.

The fall of 2016 saw the release of the widely popular First World War video game Battlefield 1. Upon the game's initial announcement and following its subsequent release, Battlefield 1 became the target of an online racist backlash that targeted the game's inclusion of soldiers of color. Across social media and online communities, players loudly proclaimed the historical inaccuracy of black soldiers in the game and called for changes to be made that correct what they considered to be a mistake that was influenced by a supposed political agenda. Through the introduction of the theoretical framework of the ‘White Mythic Space’, this book seeks to investigate the reasons behind the racist rejection of soldiers of color by Battlefield 1 players in order to answer the question: Why do individuals reject the presence of people of African descent in popular representations of history?

This book explores the moral place of the dead in our lives and in our afterlives. It argues that our lives are saturated by the past intentions and values of the dead, and that we offer the dead a form of modest immortality by fulfilling our obligations to remember them. In the first part of the book, the author examines the scope and limits of our obligations to the dead. Our obligations to respect the wishes of the dead are more substantial than commonly acknowledged, but they can be overridden in a range of cases when they conflict with the vital interests of the living, such as in organ donation and wealth inheritance. By contrast, the author contends that the obligation to remember, at least collectively, cannot be completely overridden. In the second part of the book, the author argues that tradition offers the dead a form of modest immortality—the dead live on insofar as we enact those intentional states with which they most identified. He draws on the Confucian view of ritual to argue that ritual absorption "reincarnates" the dead in the actions of the living. Finally, the author defends a Jamesian account of a pluralistic self that is consistent with the view that we have obligations to the individual dead and that the selves of the dead are pragmatic constructions. Living with the Dead will appeal to scholars and students interested in the philosophy of death, ethics, and cross-cultural philosophy.

A resource guide to help people and organizations understand challenging and sensitive conversations, and integrate them into American lives in a meaningful way. The guide will provide key links to organizations, local and national support groups and government agencies to help readers identify, report and manage discrimination in personal, professional and academic settings.