One of the book readings this week was pages 168-187 in The Power of Place Urban Landscapes as Public History by Dolores Hayden, which was chapter 7 entitled Rediscovering an African American Homestead.  It was a breakdown of how the memorial for Biddy Mason was planned and established on Spring Street in Los Angeles in the late 1980’s. 

             The other book reading was pages 1-144 in Confederates in the Attic Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz, which covered chapter’s one through six.  This book is about Horwitz’s travels around the South and his experiences with Civil War history, the people who have a passion for it and how it’s remembered today.  

            Never mind the slavery, have you dipped a candle yet? was an interesting take on how house museums and historic sites leave out certain historical facts and events in order to not ‘rock the boat’.  The author uses examples of Southern plantation house museums downplaying the role of slavery to get his point across. Sites that are making an effort to include slavery in their interpretations are also mentioned.

Horton Grove slave quarters at the Stagville State Historic Site. Photo courtesy of  the Stagville State Historic Site webpage The Structures.

            Another web reading was A white man remembers slavery in the Shenandoah Valley from Cenantua’s Blog.  It was a posting of a letter found in the local newspaper by the blog author Robert Moore. The letter was written by Jacob H. Coffman and was published in the Page News and Courier on January 1, 1932.  Coffman writes about his experiences with slavery, and concludes with how some of the slave holders he knew seemed to reap consequences that were a result of their slave holder status.  He also mentions some slave holders who were ‘nice’ to their slaves.

            The web reading Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph by Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr. discusses the claim by Yale historian David Blight that Neo-Confederates are trying to change history by saying the Civil War wasn’t about slavery and that thousands of African Americans willingly joined the Confederate army, some even alongside their masters.  It uses an example of a picture of black Union soldiers that had been doctored to look like a group of black Confederate soldiers and is being sold by a pro-confederacy online store www.rebelstore.com as an authentic historical artifact.

            A website we visited this week was Sons of Confederate Veterans.  This website took on a different view of the Civil War than just about everything else out there.  A quote from their home page is “The citizen-soldiers who fought for the Confederacy personified the best qualities of America. The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision to fight the Second American Revolution. The tenacity with which Confederate soldiers fought underscored their belief in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. These attributes are the underpinning of our democratic society and represent the foundation on which this nation was built.”  The rest of the website is in the same theme. It offers research assistance on genealogy projects, history links supporting Confederate views, and a store where you can buy anything from southern music to children’s books on the Civil War.  This website defends that the Civil War was not about slavery all the while iterating that President Lincoln and the North were not about slave rights, and didn’t want to give slaves their freedom either.  They brush over the realities of slavery in the South, and while they don’t deny that there was slavery, it never goes into any depth on the issue.   There are links to report ‘Heritage Violations’, which are defined as an attack on the Confederate Heritage represented by their flags, monuments or symbols.

Sons of Confederate Veterans logo. Photo Courtesy of Sons of Confederate Veterans website.