Monumental Harm
Monumental Harm

Author: Roger C. Hartley

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1643361708

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A road map for addressing and resolving the debate surrounding Confederate monuments in the United States In recent years, the debate over the future of Confederate monuments has taken center stage and caused bitter clashes in communities throughout the American South. At the heart of the debate is the question of what these monuments represent. The arguments and counterarguments are formulated around sets of assumptions grounded in Southern history, politics, culture, and race relations. Comprehending and evaluating accurately the associated claims and counterclaims calls for a careful examination of facts and legal considerations relevant to each side's assertations. In Monumental Harm, Roger C. Hartley offers a road map to addressing and resolving this acrimonious debate. Although history and popular memory play a vital role in the discussion, there have been distortions of both parts. Monumental Harm reviews the fact-based history of the initial raising of these monuments and distinguishes it from the popular memory held by many Confederate-monument supporters. Hartley also addresses concerns regarding the potential erasure of history and the harm these monuments have caused the African American community over the years, as well as the role they continue to play in politics and power. The recent rise in White nationalism and the video-recorded murders of Black citizens at the hands of White police officers have led to nationwide demonstrations and increased scrutiny of Confederate monuments on public land. As injustice is laid bare and tempers flare, the need for a peaceful resolution becomes ever-more necessary. Monumental Harm offers a way to break the rhetorical deadlock, urging that we evaluate the issue through the lens of the U.S. Constitution while employing the overarching democratic principle that no right is absolute. Through constructive discourse and good-faith compromise, a more perfect union is within reach.

Reading Confederate Monuments
Reading Confederate Monuments

Author: Maria Seger

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2022-08-24

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1496841654

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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.

Reconstruction beyond 150
Reconstruction beyond 150

Author: Orville Vernon Burton

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2023-08-21

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 0813949874

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No period of United States history is more important and still less understood than Reconstruction. Now, at the sesquicentennial of the Reconstruction era, Vernon Burton and Brent Morris bring together the best new scholarship on the critical years after the Civil War and before the onset of Jim Crow, synthesizing social, political, economic, and cultural approaches to understanding this crucial period. Reconstruction was the most progressive period in United States history. Although marred by frequent violence and tragedy, it was a revolutionary era that offered hope, opportunity, and against all odds, a new birth of freedom for all Americans. Even though many of the gains of Reconstruction were rolled back and replaced with a repressive social and legal regime for African Americans, the radical spark was never fully extinguished. Its spirit fanned back into flame with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and its ramifications remain palpable to this day.

America's Unending Civil War
America's Unending Civil War

Author: William Nester

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2025-06-30

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1399081217

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The Civil War fascinates Americans like no other war in their history. Many Americans are still fighting some of the war’s issues in an Odyssey that stretches back to the first settlement and will persist until the end of time. The war itself was an Iliad of brilliant generals like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan for the Union, or Lee, Jackson, and Forrest for the Confederacy; epic battles like Gettysburg and Chickamauga; epic sieges like Vicksburg and Petersburg; and epic naval combats such as Monitor versus Merrimack, or Kearsarge versus Alabama. It was America’s most horrific war, with more dead than all others combined. Around 625,000 soldiers and 125,000 civilians died from various causes, bringing the total to 750,000 people. Of 31 million Americans, 2.1 million northerners and 880,000 southerners donned uniforms. Why did eleven states eventually ban together to rebel against the United States? President Jefferson Davis began an answer when he said: ‘If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, Died of a Theory.’ That theory justified the enslavement of blacks by whites as a natural right and duty of a superior race over an inferior race; a theory, it was believed, that morally and economically elevated both races. Although slavery was the Civil War’s core cause, there were related chronic conflicts over the nature of government, citizenship, liberty, property, equality, wealth, race, identity, justice, crime, voting, power, and history – some of which issues have never entirely gone away. America’s Unending Civil War is unique among thousands of books on the subject. None before has explored the Civil War’s related and enduring conflicts of ideas and principles through four centuries of a nation’s history.

Exiting Violence
Exiting Violence

Author: Debora Tonelli

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 3110796821

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In the 20th and 21st centuries, where violence has scarred countless lives, the interplay between religion, politics, and conflict remains a complex web. Exiting Violence looks to untangle some of these knots, showing not only how faith can ignite bloodshed, but also how it can inspire peace and build bridges. Resulting from an international collaboration between the Fondazione Bruno Kessler, RESET-Dialogues Among Civilizations, and the Berkley Center for Religion Peace and World Affairs, this collection assesses the state of scholarship and explores the differing ways in which religion can contribute to societies and communities exiting situations of violence and hatred. From Biblical hermeneutics to Buddhism, from secularism to legal systems, Exiting Violence offers a nuanced and thought-provoking exploration of the multifaceted role religion plays in the human struggle for peace and justice.

Art, Power, and Politics
Art, Power, and Politics

Author: Michael A. Genovese

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1666940623

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Stories matter. Stories help us digest information, make sense of our world, understand ourselves and remember. This book takes political storytelling seriously. It examines stories as presented in paintings, music, and Films. and concludes with commentary designed to make sense of the role of political stories in our lives.

From Hannibal to Sulla
From Hannibal to Sulla

Author: Carsten Hjort Lange

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-01-29

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 3111335216

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The second century BCE was a time of prolonged debate at Rome about the changing nature of warfare. From the outbreak of the Second Punic War in 218 to Rome’s first civil war in 88 BCE, warfare shifted from the struggle against a great external enemy to a conflict against internal parties. This book argues that Rome’s Italian subjects were central to this development: having rebelled and defected to Hannibal at the end of the third century, the allies again rebelled in 91 BCE, with significant consequences for Roman thought about warfare as such. These "rebellions" constituted an Italian renewal of the war against their old conqueror, Rome, and an internal war within the polity. Accordingly, we need to add 'internal war' to the already well-established dichotomy of foreign and civil war. This fresh analysis of the second century demonstrates that the Roman experience of internal war during this period provided the natural stepping-stone in the invention of civil war as such. It conceives of the period from the Second Punic War onward as an 'antebellum' period to the later civil war(s) of the Late Republic, during which contemporary observers looked back at the last 'great war' against Hannibal in preparation for the next conflict.

Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness
Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness

Author: John Michael Corrigan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-11-16

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1009377817

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William Faulkner continues to be an author who is widely read, studied, and admired. This book provides a new and interdisciplinary account of Faulkner's legacy, arguing that his fiction is just as relevant today as it was during his own time. Indeed, Faulkner's far-reaching critique of his Southern heritage speaks directly to the anti-racism discourse of our own time and engages the dire threat to subjecthood in a technologically saturated civilization. Combining literary critique with network and complexity science, this study offers a new reading of William Faulkner as a novelist for the information age. Over the course of his career, we find an artist struggling to articulate the threat to human wellbeing in rapidly scaling social systems and gradually developing a hard-won humanism that affirms the individual and interpersonal life as a source of novelty and social change.

The Southern Past
The Southern Past

Author: William Fitzhugh Brundage

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 9780674028982

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Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. Indeed, today's controversies over flying the Confederate flag, renaming schools and streets, and commemorating the Civil War and the civil rights movement are only the latest examples of this ongoing divisive contest over issues of regional identity and heritage. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups. For more than a century after the Civil War, elite white Southerners systematically refined a version of the past that sanctioned their racial privilege and power. In the process, they filled public spaces with museums and monuments that made their version of the past sacrosanct. Yet, even as segregation and racial discrimination worsened, blacks contested the white version of Southern history and demanded inclusion. Streets became sites for elaborate commemorations of emancipation and schools became centers for the study of black history. This counter-memory surged forth, and became a potent inspiration for the civil rights movement and the black struggle to share a common Southern past rather than a divided one. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's searing exploration of how those who have the political power to represent the past simultaneously shape the present and determine the future is a valuable lesson as we confront our national past to meet the challenge of current realities.