Departments

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Roundup

  • SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
    6/29/2020

    A Monument to Our Shared Purpose

    by Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins

    The Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington embodies not white supremacy, but African-American agency and cooperative struggle.

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    7/1/2020

    Celebrating 50 Years of Essence as a Black Women’s Archive

    by Jacinta R. Saffold

    "For the last 50 years, Essence Magazine has consistently found innovative approaches to archiving Black women’s lives by immortalizing our intellect, literature, and culture on glossy pages," writes Jacinta R. Saffold.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    7/2/2020

    A True American Monument to Trumpian Times

    by Lawrence Weschler

    The author pleads for the Lakota Sioux to authorize another giant bas-relief, featuring four leaders of right-wing politics, media and the courts with their heads in a pillory. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    6/30/2020

    Fear of Falling: Can Making Black Lives Matter Rescue a Failing State?

    by Rebecca Gordon

    Recent American failures to control vigilante violence, provide public services, and reach common decisions are indicative of a failing state; addressing demands of the Black Lives Matter movement will push America to rebuild its capacity to work for the common good. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    7/1/2020

    Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause

    by David W. Blight

    We should not celebrate too much as monuments topple and old slave-auction blocks are removed. History did not end when the Soviet Union dissolved, and it will not end now, even if a vibrant movement sweeps a new age of civil rights into America. Most of all, we must remember what the Lost Cause is and was before we try to call it past.

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    6/29/2020

    Confederates in the Capitol

    by William Hogeland

    Even as the United States declined to enforce the Constitution in the former Confederate states, demolishing black citizens’ lives and liberty, first Lee and then the ten other Confederate statues arrived in the hall, with others that have since been replaced, and were embraced by the collection. The whole federal government approved.

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    7/1/2020

    The True Story of the Freed Slave Kneeling at Lincoln’s Feet

    by Laurie Maffly-Kipp

    The silence of the fugitive slave, the stillness and nakedness of the figure of Archer Alexander on the Emancipation Memorial, may well reflect the fragments of African American life that whites were able to see, but they should not be mistaken for empty space or lack of a voice.

  • SOURCE: Harvard Magazine
    6/29/2020

    Calhoun-Fall

    by Peter H. Wood

    "When word spread that the Charleston City Council had voted unanimously to remove the domineering figure from his skyscraping column, I thought of a comment Walt Whitman recorded at the end of the Civil War. After Confederate forces had surrendered at Appomattox Court House, the poet overheard a Union soldier observe that the true monuments to Calhoun were the wasted farms and gaunt chimneys scattered over the South."

  • SOURCE: Times of Israel
    6/30/2020

    St. Louis’s Statue of Pius XII: A Double-Standard

    by Eunice G. Pollack

    If Yale has renamed a residential college named for John C. Calhoun and Princeton will cease to name its public policy school after Woodrow Wilson, the Jesuit St. Louis University should consider evidence of Pope Pius XII's actions in the face of the Holocaust and remove his statue from campus.