Confederate Monuments and the Changing Commemorative Landscape with Hilary Green
Greetings all!
Before I begin with my formal introduction, I just wanted to say a few words about today’s show. Today is June 25, 2020 and as you all know, for the past few weeks millions of people have taken to the streets around the nation and around the world protesting excessive police violence leveled at black people in the United States. One of their primary targets in the southern states especially have been Confederate monuments – that for many symbolize the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow era and continue to remind us of our country’s legacy of racism. As of today, many of these monuments have either been removed or are in the process of removal…and as this commemorative landscape is changing as each day passes, I wanted to have Dr Hilary Green on the show to help us understand exactly what’s going on. She is an expert in the field of memory studies and has been doing very important work on social media discussing, among other things, the power dynamics of Confederate monumentation over the last several decades. This is a developing story…so to keep up with everything that is happening in real time please follow Dr. Green on Twitter @HilaryGreen77 . Okay…so with all that, here we go…
Dr. Hilary N. Green is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at The University of Alabama. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016) as well as articles, book chapters and other scholarly publications. She is the co-series editor of Reconstruction Reconsidered, a University of South Carolina Press series, a book review editor for the Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians, and the Digital Media editor for Muster, the online blog for the Journal of the Civil War Era.
In January 2015, she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project, which explores slavery, memory and its legacy at the University of Alabama. In addition to several short publications, she is currently at work on a second book manuscript examining how everyday African Americans remembered and commemorated the Civil War. During the 2020-2021 academic year, she will be the Vann Professor of Ethics in Society at Davidson College.
Seriously guys…if you listen to just one of my shows - listen to this one. It’s important. We discuss:
Jim Crow, the political process, and who gets to decide the “values” of a society
Black folks and their pushback against the monuments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Erasing history (omg)
Monument dedication speeches
The Confederate presence on college campuses - especially the University of Alabama
Google maps and the removal of Confederate monuments (click HERE)
Repurposing Confederate monuments
How we might preserve Confederate monuments and contextualize them for educational purposes
Monuments on the battlefields and the National Park Service
Have a listen…
Be sure to follow Hilary on Twitter and check out her work HERE. AND…don’t forget to subscribe to The Rogue Historian Podcast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite app so you never ever ever ever miss a show. That would be dumb.