I haven’t felt much like writing anything this week. It’s hard to focus when nineteen innocent children and two teachers are murdered in their own classroom and our elected leaders refuse to do anything to address it. The focus on mental health is a red herring. No other nation in the world experiences mass shootings on such a scale.
Here are a few links to end the work week that are worth exploring. I hope all of you enjoy a reflective and relaxing Memorial Day Weekend.
First a reminder that one of the earliest documented Memorial Day celebrations was organized by African Americans in Charleston in 1865.
In the News
The Naming Commission, created by Congress, has released its suggestions for renaming military bases named in honor of Confederate leaders.
Benning gets its proposed name from Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, who led men in the Ia Drang valley during the Vietnam War, and his wife Julia, who prompted the Pentagon to create casualty notification teams who handle notifications when family members are killed in service.
The Confederate monument in front of the courthouse in Caddo Parish, Louisiana will soon be removed.
The marble and granite monument was erected between 1902 and 1906 on the grounds of the Caddo Parish Courthouse, which was built in 1926, where two previous courthouses stood. One of those original courthouses even served as the state capital of Louisiana during the Civil War.
Op-Eds
Interesting piece about monuments, dedicated to Native American women, that have been vandalized and gone missing.
On the surface, the thefts and vandalism of these statues of Native women, like the thefts and vandalism of pioneer women statues in 1969 and 2013, might appear to have been opportunistic crimes motivated by potential financial gain. But viewing these acts in the context of decades of contestation over Confederate, colonialist and pioneer monuments suggests a much deeper meaning.
This piece by Laura Brodie does a really good job of exploring how Robert E. Lee’s physical appearance informed the Lost Cause.
Du Bois’s placement of birth alongside beauty acknowledged a growing threat: the weaponization of Lee’s flesh in the eugenics movement. By 1934 Douglas Southall Freeman would be promoting Lee as his poster child for “clean blood,” describing him as the product of five generations of “wise mating.” In his Pulitzer-winning biography/hagiography, Freeman gushed over Lee’s fine teeth, hair and head measurement and placed special emphasis on his thin lips.
New to the Civil War Memory Library
Stephen Berry, Count The Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death As We Know It (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
Nicole Eustice: Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America (Liveright, 2021). [2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner]
Elizabeth Leonoard, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
Kathryn Olivarius, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2022).
Video
A look at Richmond without the monuments.
Panel discussion about 1862 and the American West at the 2022 meetin of the OAH in Boston.
University of Alabama historian Lesely Gordon lectures on the legacy of the Civil War in the South. (will air tomorrow, May 28 on C-SPAN)
I wasn’t aware that Elizabeth Leonard had a new book. Her one on Joseph Holt was outstanding.