Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: The structures, statues, flags, and emblems that people see in public spaces shape how they react to and interpret American history. This poster session will examine how monuments on the South Carolina State House grounds and at the new Matthew J. Perry, Jr. United States Court House in Columbia interpret the Civil War, African American history, and the Civil Rights movement. The presentation will interweave photographic documentation of five monuments and personal observations of recent events with published scholarship, newspaper articles, and online sources. Until 2001 statues of white male political and military figures dominated the State House grounds. The most conspicuous one is the Soldier Monument to Confederate Dead in the Civil War (1879), facing Main Street. Just behind it is a Confederate battle flag, raised on a thirty-foot flagpole after a protracted political battle resulted in the removal from the dome, on July 1, 2000, of the Confederate Naval Jack that had flown over the State House under a February 1962 resolution of the General Assembly for the Centennial Celebration of the Civil War. On the other side of the State House, a monument, “reared by the men of their state 1909-11,” effusively extols white women’s contributions to the Confederacy. A winged female figure is crowning with a laurel wreath a seated woman with a book. Nearby is Strom Thurmond’s statue (1999), to which his eldest child’s name was chiseled below the names of his four white children in 2004. After he died, seventy-eight-year old Mrs. Essie Mae Washington-Williams came forward to reveal that the senator was her father. Her mother, Carrie Butler, had been a 16-year old African American housekeeper for the Thurmond family in Edgefield.

A privately funded African American History Monument (2001) is their first on any state house grounds. Twelve bronze panels with inscriptions and relief figures tell their story from slavery through the modern Civil Rights era. The figures do not literally represent particular individuals, but rather suggest African American men and women important in the state’s history. Though situated only several hundred yards from the Confederate Soldier Monument, the historical and psychological distance between them is far greater than the geographical distance. The public space devoted to African American civil rights received a welcome addition with the dedication of the courthouse and monument to Judge Matthew Perry (2004). Around his seated statue are the figures of two boys and a girl, suggesting perhaps the future Harvey Gantt and Henrie Monteith, who integrated, respectively, Clemson University and the University of South Carolina in 1963.

Today, African Americans have their own history monument on the State House grounds and a federal courthouse dedicated to their most distinguished judge. Yet, the cultural battle continues, as they and Confederate heritage groups compete for public space and recognition. The task of historians and other scholars is to provide an accurate context and interpretation. What should monuments, flags, and public buildings really teach us?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Commemoration of martyrs by national minorities tends to be hesitant, cautious and ambivalent. This argument is illustrated by analyzing the proliferation of memorial monuments among the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel from 1998 to 2003. First, the article analyzes the failed attempt in 1998 to establish memorial monuments for the Palestinian victims of the 1948 war; second, it discuss the wave of monuments which swept the Palestinian towns and villages in Israel after the events of October 2000, during which thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed by the police. As a national minority involved in a continuous political struggle with the nation state, the Palestinians in Israel have an extremely low level of control over public space. In addition, the commemoration of Palestinian martyrs is interpreted by the Jewish majority in Israel as challenging the legitimacy of state sovereignty. These two factors have created an especially hesitant and vacillating process of commemoration. The trauma of October 2000 has partially transformed this pattern, since it invoked a growing awareness of the limits of the civil and political rights of Arabs in Israel.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: In the past decade, the rural Utah community of Escalante has shifted from dependence on the extractive capabilities of surrounding natural resources to a greater reliance on amenity tourism. This change can be attributed to the 1996 designation of the lands surrounding Escalante as the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (GSENM). While Escalante has seen some in-migration aimed at taking advantage of the monument designation, there are still many residents who feel they did not have a voice in the designation process. We use survey data from the summer of 2006 to examine long-standing residents’ level of satisfaction with the public participation processes that preceded the designation of the GSENM as well as their level of satisfaction with how public participation processes are currently being undertaken by public officials. Further, we compare current levels of satisfaction between long-standing residents and residents who have in-migrated to Escalante since the monument designation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper will analyze the political processes and meanings of memorialization in the aftermath of the repressive Pinochet regime (1990-present) as a lens into contemporary Chilean politics. It argues that memorials can invite a conversation among a bro

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Public surveys of cultural property have become a common institution across the globe since World War II. Characterised by a bureaucratic and scientific approach to the past, such surveys present an interesting challenge to concepts and assumptions that have become most familiar to scholars of culture in the context of modern nation-states.
While existing studies of national identity are predicated on the assumption that the state production of culture is by definition geared toward homogeneity and integration, the case of France’s General Inventory of art and monuments surprisingly shows that the French state has actively and increasingly promoted the development of "local nationalism" and cultural heterogeneity since the 1960s. How to interpret and explain the production of cultural diversity by the French state in the contemporary era?
Three types of explanations (political, economic and cultural) can be derived from the comparatively small body of sociological literature dealing more specifically with the questions of “heritage” and memory construction in contemporary societies. I argue that these explanations only partially account for the role of the state in the process. Based on historical and qualitative research of the French Inventory, as well as on other cases of public inventories of cultural property in Europe, I examine the impact of a factor that has been largely ignored so far: the bureaucratic and scientific culture at work in the national survey and related policies of historical preservation. This alternative, state-centered explanation, allows me to evaluate the extent but also the limits of the cultural opening of the nation-state to local particularism.