HIST164 - American Monuments

Disputes over Confederate monuments expose a truth: The landscape of memory is a field of power. This place-based course examines U.S. public memory as expressed in the built environment--its making in the long nineteenth century, and its remaking in the long twentieth century. Lectures and readings cover a variety of memorial practices and structures, including obelisks, statues, edifices, cemeteries, battlefields, massacre sites, landmark buildings, and historic trees. (Museum collections, though important, will not be emphasized.) Drawing on cultural history, political history, and legal history, the instructor will help to explain the historic inscription of settler colonialism onto the nation's memorial landscape, and contextualize current efforts to decolonize U.S. public memory. For their part, students will have opportunities to do research on the monuments of Philadelphia.