Concurrent Session 4-B

Location

Bryant Hall, Room 200

Start Date

15-3-2025 3:00 PM

End Date

15-3-2025 4:15 PM

Description

  • Why Is It So Hard to Remember James Meredith?
    Dave Tell, Department of Communication Studies, University of Kansas
    This presentation tells the story of the 11-year effort to put up a statue to Mr. Meredith on the campus of the University of Mississippi. The story tacks back and forth between the movement to commemorate integration (led by the erstwhile celebrity John T. Edge) and the increasingly fraught life of James Meredith. It paints an intimate portrait of Meredith as an American hero (who integrated Ole Miss) and an equally intimate portrait of Meredith as an American embarrassment (he stumped for David Duke). Foregrounding the story of Meredith, Edge, and the seemingly impossible task of commemorating integration, my presentation poses a fundamental question of commemorative ethics: how do we remember complex people? It is premised on the assumption that our commemorative habits are well-tuned for remembering heroes or embarrassments (e.g., King or Bull Connor; the underground railroad or the trail of tears), but are less practiced in the art of telling complex stories about complex people. We know how to put statues up and, increasingly, we know how to take them down. But how do we tell the stories of complex people and failed heroes. Our inability to answer this question may explain why Meredith is the most prominent civil rights veteran for whom there is not a biography.
  • Underground Memories: Bomb Shelters as Memory Sites for Civil War in Spain
    David A. Messenger, Chair and Professor, Department of History, University of South Alabama
    The infamous bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War, on April 27, 1937, is recognized as the “first total destruction of an undefended civilian target by aerial bombardment.” In reality, the bombardment of civilians from the air was a regular feature of the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939, especially in cities along the Mediterranean coast. Today, in a country with no museum that commemorates the civil war, a number of communities have chosen to turn bomb shelters constructed to protect civilians from aerial bombardment into memorial sites. In war, these shelters were designed, managed and run by civilians, mandated by the Republican Government, to organize civilian or “passive” defense of cities during bombings. This proactive response by civilians to what they recognized as a war targeting them is an important and under-studied history of the Spanish Civil War; the memorialization of these sites thus is significant, given the lack of other Civil War memorials, in casting commemoration of the conflict in certain ways that highlight civilians in war as the primary targets and primary activists. This paper will examine multiple bomb shelter memorials in order to extract from them a sense of how the memory of the Spanish Civil War is being shaped in the contemporary era.
  • Chair: Dan Demetriou, Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Morris

Relational Format

Conference proceeding

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

Concurrent Session 4-B

Bryant Hall, Room 200

  • Why Is It So Hard to Remember James Meredith?
    Dave Tell, Department of Communication Studies, University of Kansas
    This presentation tells the story of the 11-year effort to put up a statue to Mr. Meredith on the campus of the University of Mississippi. The story tacks back and forth between the movement to commemorate integration (led by the erstwhile celebrity John T. Edge) and the increasingly fraught life of James Meredith. It paints an intimate portrait of Meredith as an American hero (who integrated Ole Miss) and an equally intimate portrait of Meredith as an American embarrassment (he stumped for David Duke). Foregrounding the story of Meredith, Edge, and the seemingly impossible task of commemorating integration, my presentation poses a fundamental question of commemorative ethics: how do we remember complex people? It is premised on the assumption that our commemorative habits are well-tuned for remembering heroes or embarrassments (e.g., King or Bull Connor; the underground railroad or the trail of tears), but are less practiced in the art of telling complex stories about complex people. We know how to put statues up and, increasingly, we know how to take them down. But how do we tell the stories of complex people and failed heroes. Our inability to answer this question may explain why Meredith is the most prominent civil rights veteran for whom there is not a biography.
  • Underground Memories: Bomb Shelters as Memory Sites for Civil War in Spain
    David A. Messenger, Chair and Professor, Department of History, University of South Alabama
    The infamous bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War, on April 27, 1937, is recognized as the “first total destruction of an undefended civilian target by aerial bombardment.” In reality, the bombardment of civilians from the air was a regular feature of the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939, especially in cities along the Mediterranean coast. Today, in a country with no museum that commemorates the civil war, a number of communities have chosen to turn bomb shelters constructed to protect civilians from aerial bombardment into memorial sites. In war, these shelters were designed, managed and run by civilians, mandated by the Republican Government, to organize civilian or “passive” defense of cities during bombings. This proactive response by civilians to what they recognized as a war targeting them is an important and under-studied history of the Spanish Civil War; the memorialization of these sites thus is significant, given the lack of other Civil War memorials, in casting commemoration of the conflict in certain ways that highlight civilians in war as the primary targets and primary activists. This paper will examine multiple bomb shelter memorials in order to extract from them a sense of how the memory of the Spanish Civil War is being shaped in the contemporary era.
  • Chair: Dan Demetriou, Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Morris