Upcoming Talks About Confederate Monuments and Memory

For those of you in the Milwaukee area I will be speaking at two locations in Kenosha on Wednesday about the history and memory of Confederate monuments. At noon I will be at Carthage College to deliver a talk that is open to the public. On Wednesday evening I will speak at the Kenosha Civil War Museum at 7pm. This talk is also free to the general public.

Thanks to Doug Dammann and Dan Joyce who helped to make this trip possible. Doug and Dan co-authored (along with Jennifer Edington) the chapter in my new book on the Kenosha Civil War Museum. I am very much looking forward to meeting them and having a chance to tour the museum for myself. My new book will be available for purchase.

Next week I am leading two tours of Boston’s Civil War monument landscape. The first is Nina Silber’s Civil War class from Boston University and the other is a high school class from Hingham. Please let me know if you are interested in organizing a tour for your students.

Finally, next Wednesday evening I will deliver a talk on the Confederate monument debate at the Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford at 7:30pm. The entrance fee is $10, but it goes to programming and the general maintenance of one of the most important historic homes in the Boston area. Hope to see some of my Boston friends at this one.

Busy times, but definitely worth it.

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4 comments… add one
  • Andy Hall Oct 18, 2017 @ 7:22

    With Richard Spencer staging an event of some sort in Gainesville tomorrow, the UNiversity Press of Florida is offering two books as free PDF downloads:

    As Gainesville prepares for a white nationalist event featuring the president of the National Policy Institute (NPI), the University Press of Florida (UPF) would like to remind its community–and the nation–to recognize the importance of facts in understanding history. As part of its scholarly mission and in an effort to combat hate with facts, UPF will be giving away free PDFs of Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture by Karen L. Cox and Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil War by William B. Lees and Frederick P. Gaske.

    The NPI president, who will speak at this week’s event at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, was part of the Unite the Right rally that turned deadly in Charlottesville this August. He marched with white supremacists to protest the city’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate Robert E. Lee. The issue hits close to home in Gainesville, where a Confederate monument was removed from the city’s downtown recently.

    As white nationalist propaganda–especially of the kind disseminated by the NPI–has been masked with the rhetoric of “preserving Southern culture” or “remembering our history,” UPF encourages the community to understand the true history behind these statues, the differences between remembering history and memorializing slavery, and the rise of this particular brand of “Southern culture.”

    “Almost none of the [Confederate] monuments were put up right after the Civil War,” UPF author Karen L. Cox stresses in a recent Washington Post op-ed: “The monuments were put up as explicit symbols of white supremacy.” In her book, Dixie’s Daughters, Cox explains how the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) erected monuments to “transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, where states’ rights and white supremacy remained intact.” The UDC “believed they could vindicate their Confederate ancestors,” Cox argues.

    In Recalling Deeds Immortal, authors William B. Lees and Frederick P. Gaske outline the precise details surrounding the installation of several Confederate monuments in Florida. They note that while the first was built in 1871, “the UDC continued to erect monuments in Florida at a steady pace through the Civil War Centennial of 1961-65.” They also discuss the Lost Cause narrative the monuments convey, explaining its “recasting [of] the Civil War as a constitutional contest in which the South fought to protect states’ rights.”

    To receive a free PDF of both books, readers should visit upress.ufl.edu. UPF will be supplying the free PDFs through Friday, October 20th.

    http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?m=1112454518762&ca=037a75c3-7b23-440c-b5e0-28a1e18cdd90

    • Kevin Levin Oct 18, 2017 @ 11:56

      This is the first I’ve heard of that event. Thanks.

  • Meg Groeling Oct 16, 2017 @ 8:19

    You simply cannot get a better venue than the Kenosha Civil War Museum. Best people ever!

    • Kevin Levin Oct 16, 2017 @ 8:57

      Really looking forward to it.

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