I have been writing books on public art and memorials since the early 1990s and served on some major public commissions that select memorials and/or determine the fate of problematic memorials. These markers in our public spaces define who we are as a culture at a certain point in time, even though interpretations of them may evolve. They are our link to our history, express our present day values, and send a message to the future about who we are and what we value and believe in.
I wrote...
Monumental Controversies: Mount Rushmore, Four Presidents, and the Quest for National Unity
In Monumental Controversies, I examine one of the most polarizing monuments and memorials in recent history, Mount Rushmore, and the Presidential figures behind it. Drawing on research, interviews with artists, activists, and government officials, and my own experiences as a panelist on commissions such as the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers (regarding NYC monuments) as well as She Built NY (about commissioning more statues to women), I seek to illuminate these complex and often divisive issues.
Rather than simply asking whether these figures are "good guys or bad guys," I acknowledge both their achievements and their shortcomings, arguing that these debates are not about erasing history, but about grappling with the complicated legacies of our nation's past.
This book defines a critical point in American history and how it was marked in our public spaces.
It makes you rethink the standard formula for a heroic monument and what its message really is.
In the cover image of the Emancipation Monument not only is the liberated slave kneeling, he is mostly unclothed and unnamed.
The imposition of images of slavery and white supremacy in our public spaces is what is being contested in the current controversies over the removal of Confederate memorials.
I found this book invaluable in historicizing a problem with which we as a nation are still grappling.
A history of U.S. Civil War monuments that shows how they distort history and perpetuate white supremacy
The United States began as a slave society, holding millions of Africans and their descendants in bondage, and remained so until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once slaves themselves. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves explores how the history of slavery and its violent end was told in public spaces-specifically in the sculptural monuments that came to dominate streets, parks, and town squares in nineteenth-century America. Looking at monuments built and unbuilt, Kirk Savage shows how the greatest…
Given the alarming number of recent deaths by gun violence it is especially illuminating to consider the various ways sites of violence have been commemorated.
Ranging from total disappearance, to informative plaques, and major memorials, communities have reckoned with the aftermath in radically different ways.
I loved this book because it made me think about the content of site - or rather the content we attribute to the ground - where something shocking happened, be it a mass shooting or any other tragic event.
Shadowed Ground explores how and why Americans have memorialized-or not-the sites of tragic and violent events spanning three centuries of history and every region of the country. For this revised edition, Kenneth Foote has written a new concluding chapter that looks at the evolving responses to recent acts of violence and terror, including the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine High School massacre, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
This book clearly illustrates the mutability of memory of even the most dramatic and significant events in American (and indeed all) history.
It makes the point that memory and historical consciousness depend on the identity of the individual as well as the passage of time and shifting political realities. In this sense, memorials are not static since they do not have a fixed definition.
After reading this book I always took into account both the personal and larger difficult to define concept of public memory when writing or speaking about memorials.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Winner of the Merle Curti award Winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize
No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The…
Following on her previous book about the Daughters of the Confederacy and their role in commissioning Confederate memorials, the author presents the history of these tributes, how they changed over time, and what their implicit meaning conveys.
Reading this book can leave no doubt that Confederate memorials must be removed because of their intrinsic valorization of white supremacy.
It was enormously useful to me in both in my current book project and in public presentations on the topic.
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today.
In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that…
We rarely stop to think about memorials in terms of what emotion might have prompted them.
That is what Doss does here, covering a wide range of subjects and geographic sites. It is clear from her analysis that grief, fear, gratitude, shame, and anger have inspired a range of works representing a range of motivations for commemoration.
After reading this book you will never look at memorials in the same way. I had never thought of memorials in terms of emotional affect before and now consider it a major factor to be considered.
In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of communism, have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now, less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In "Memorial Mania", Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express - and claim - those issues in visibly…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives about adoption, exposing the fallacy that adoption is always good.
In this story, I reckon with the pain and unanswered questions of my own experience and explore broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization, and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children. Now is the moment we must all hear these stories.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
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