Monuments and Memory: Civil War Statuary, Public-Facing Scholarship, and the Future of Memory Studies

Abstract

Abstract: In the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder, there was renewed focus on Confederate monuments within ongoing debates and protests about racial justice and racist violence. Civil War historians are constantly asked about monuments, regardless of whether they study them. In part, this roundtable seeks to help all those scholars feel comfortable engaging with these questions while also considering where the field of Civil War memory studies is and where it goes next. Bringing together eight scholars and history practitioners, the roundtable covers a range of topics, including discussion about northern monuments, African American commemorations of the war, the impact of a commemorative landscape filled almost exclusively with statues of white men, whether protests have shaped historians' views of Confederate monuments, how to understand more recent Civil War memorials, the role of historians in public debate, the role of "presentism" in history, and the future of Civil War memory studies.