Concurrent Session 4-A

Location

Bryant Hall, Room 111

Start Date

15-3-2025 3:00 PM

End Date

15-3-2025 4:15 PM

Description

  • Depressionlands: The 1930s and the American Memorial Landscape
    Darren E. Grem, Associate Professor of History and Southern Studies, University of Mississippi
    In the immediate years after the Great Depression ended, Americans worked hard to remember the “hard times” of the 1930s via memorials to the decade’s most prominent events and figures, especially Franklin D. Roosevelt. Public works sites and federal programs, from various alphabet agencies to the Tennessee Valley Authority to Social Security, carried along remembrances of the New Deal liberal state, as did accounts, songs, stories, and photographs that New Dealers (and their critics) redeployed about the decade's systemic deprivations and state reforms. Later memorialists used such raw materials to craft their own imagined “depressionlands" of the remembered 1930s, often to undergird or undercut New Deal liberalism’s continuance in the 1950s and beyond. This paper offers a very brief tour of the Great Depression’s memorial landscape—focusing on a handful of sites in Mississippi—to provoke several methodological and ethical questions: Whose economic trauma and deprivation could or should be privileged in public memory? Why do certain memorials, physical or otherwise, garner cultural or political purchase and lasting prevalence, while others fade from view? What remnants of memory remain today from the Great Depression and New Deal, and how do they shape (mis)remembrance of more-recent episodes of systemic crisis, from the Great Recession to COVID-19? In addressing such questions, I intend to present an interdisciplinary methodology for examining the memorial landscapes of capitalism and the modern liberal state, both understudied subjects in memory studies. I also want to spark conversation about how to remember ethically the depressionlands of contemporary America, especially as the economic and political arrangements of the 2020s-2030s seem positioned to comport to the hard times of the 1920s-1930s.
  • Values Shift and Virtue Signals: The Ethics of Memorialization in Charlottesville
    Tom Seabrook, PhD student, History Program, George Mason University
    Can a city profess one ethical identity while its built environment displays antithetical principles? Charlottesville, Virginia, proclaims a moral civic identity as a city dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Until 2021, however, the city’s monumental public art projected an older vision of a society dedicated to white supremacy. I argue that white leaders in Charlottesville and at the University of Virginia embraced a form of commemorative tokenism (virtue signaling) by the end of the twentieth century, supporting minimal recognition of African American history while maintaining a memorial landscape steeped in nonwhite exclusion. The result was a city with an ethical dilemma, where increasing calls for inclusivity clashed with a century of physically encoded white supremacy. Throughout the Jim Crow era, Charlottesville’s native-born white Protestants upheld an ethics steeped in eugenics, asserting their own superiority and dominance through both construction (e.g., the creation of Lost Cause memorials) and destruction (e.g., the demolition of Charlottesville’s African American business district, Vinegar Hill). After the dismantling of de jure segregation in the 1960s, many Americans embraced what some scholars have termed a “new civic religion of tolerance,” with memorials to Civil Rights leaders reflecting an ethical paradigm shift away from the white supremacy that defined earlier decades. This paradigm shift did not manifest in every urban environment, however. By reading Charlottesville’s memorial landscape, I will show that the post-1960s culture of tolerance left few marks on the city’s built environment until the 2020s. Even after 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally and the removal of Confederate and imperialist monuments in 2021, Charlottesville remains a city whose ethics do not align with its memorialization. I argue that memorialization matters more than many of today’s leaders realize. Inclusive ethical policies can only partially succeed if stakeholders fail to pay attention to a city’s memorial landscape.
  • Chair: Teresa Simone, Department of Theatre and Film, University of Mississippi

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Mar 15th, 3:00 PM Mar 15th, 4:15 PM

Concurrent Session 4-A

Bryant Hall, Room 111

  • Depressionlands: The 1930s and the American Memorial Landscape
    Darren E. Grem, Associate Professor of History and Southern Studies, University of Mississippi
    In the immediate years after the Great Depression ended, Americans worked hard to remember the “hard times” of the 1930s via memorials to the decade’s most prominent events and figures, especially Franklin D. Roosevelt. Public works sites and federal programs, from various alphabet agencies to the Tennessee Valley Authority to Social Security, carried along remembrances of the New Deal liberal state, as did accounts, songs, stories, and photographs that New Dealers (and their critics) redeployed about the decade's systemic deprivations and state reforms. Later memorialists used such raw materials to craft their own imagined “depressionlands" of the remembered 1930s, often to undergird or undercut New Deal liberalism’s continuance in the 1950s and beyond. This paper offers a very brief tour of the Great Depression’s memorial landscape—focusing on a handful of sites in Mississippi—to provoke several methodological and ethical questions: Whose economic trauma and deprivation could or should be privileged in public memory? Why do certain memorials, physical or otherwise, garner cultural or political purchase and lasting prevalence, while others fade from view? What remnants of memory remain today from the Great Depression and New Deal, and how do they shape (mis)remembrance of more-recent episodes of systemic crisis, from the Great Recession to COVID-19? In addressing such questions, I intend to present an interdisciplinary methodology for examining the memorial landscapes of capitalism and the modern liberal state, both understudied subjects in memory studies. I also want to spark conversation about how to remember ethically the depressionlands of contemporary America, especially as the economic and political arrangements of the 2020s-2030s seem positioned to comport to the hard times of the 1920s-1930s.
  • Values Shift and Virtue Signals: The Ethics of Memorialization in Charlottesville
    Tom Seabrook, PhD student, History Program, George Mason University
    Can a city profess one ethical identity while its built environment displays antithetical principles? Charlottesville, Virginia, proclaims a moral civic identity as a city dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Until 2021, however, the city’s monumental public art projected an older vision of a society dedicated to white supremacy. I argue that white leaders in Charlottesville and at the University of Virginia embraced a form of commemorative tokenism (virtue signaling) by the end of the twentieth century, supporting minimal recognition of African American history while maintaining a memorial landscape steeped in nonwhite exclusion. The result was a city with an ethical dilemma, where increasing calls for inclusivity clashed with a century of physically encoded white supremacy. Throughout the Jim Crow era, Charlottesville’s native-born white Protestants upheld an ethics steeped in eugenics, asserting their own superiority and dominance through both construction (e.g., the creation of Lost Cause memorials) and destruction (e.g., the demolition of Charlottesville’s African American business district, Vinegar Hill). After the dismantling of de jure segregation in the 1960s, many Americans embraced what some scholars have termed a “new civic religion of tolerance,” with memorials to Civil Rights leaders reflecting an ethical paradigm shift away from the white supremacy that defined earlier decades. This paradigm shift did not manifest in every urban environment, however. By reading Charlottesville’s memorial landscape, I will show that the post-1960s culture of tolerance left few marks on the city’s built environment until the 2020s. Even after 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally and the removal of Confederate and imperialist monuments in 2021, Charlottesville remains a city whose ethics do not align with its memorialization. I argue that memorialization matters more than many of today’s leaders realize. Inclusive ethical policies can only partially succeed if stakeholders fail to pay attention to a city’s memorial landscape.
  • Chair: Teresa Simone, Department of Theatre and Film, University of Mississippi