HST 172 REMEMBERING THE CIVIL WAR

Even before the last major Confederate Army surrendered in May 1865, Americans began to fight over the memory of the Civil War.  We are still fighting, as events in Charlottesville in summer 2017 demonstrated.  Of particular interest to this class is the landscape of memorialization that white Southerners created in the postwar period, often with funding from white Northern sympathizers—a landscape which we still inhabit more than a century and a half later.  We still live among statues of Confederate veterans, well-positioned Confederate flags, and buildings named after Confederate leaders.  We will spend most of the class exploring the meaning of these symbols of a white supremacist regime, as well as the very contemporary conflicts over them.  We will also give some attention to memorials/ways of remembering sponsored by black Americans and white Northerners.