Monday’s reading is from one of our required books for the semester, Thomas J. Brown’s The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration. The assigned pages (pp. 1-55, 79-108) cover a wide range of documents and themes related to how people have commemorated the war in the past and how it is remembered today.
For your required comment on this post, I would like you to visit the Dick Dowling statue in Hermann Park, and compare it with the monuments whose designs and inscriptions are discussed by Brown on pp. 22-41. Then briefly answer: What conclusions would you draw about the Dowling statue based on its similarity to or difference from other monuments discussed by Brown? See below for a map of how to get to the statue, which is about seven-tenths of a mile away.
The “Brown College” group should post comments before class, and the rest of you can comment after class.
Although the comment assignment only relates to part of the Brown reading, be prepared to discuss the other parts in class on Monday. In particular, I’d like you to think about whether a culture of Civil War commemoration that focuses on “conciliation” and “reunion” inevitably tends to work in tandem with a “Lost Cause” memory of the war. Is it possible to commemorate the Confederacy without focusing on its ideological objectives? Also, based on the readings, think about how you believe the war should be commemorated today, on its one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary.
7 Responses to Brown Book Comments