Week 11

Coming into this new week, I am adding to the work we have from last semester. In this week's meeting, Doctor Gannon and I reviewed some work I have done. While looking it over, we decided we need more context regarding contemporary action. So I started work on that addition. Particularly regarding the discussion over the removal of monuments. I have been reading various news articles about the subject. This has been an issue brought up by many for years. However, now cities are removing Confederate monuments. 

I read an interview with Annette Gordon-Reed, who is a professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law. This interview brought up something I hadn't thought about. While discussing the monuments of Washington and Jefferson, who also owned slaves, Gordon-Reed states "...No one puts a monument up to Washington or Jefferson to promote slavery. The monuments go up because, without Washington, there likely would not have been an American nation. They put up monuments to T.J. because of the Declaration of Independence, which every group has used to make their place in American society..." (Walsh, Colleen) The 'why' of a monument is something to think about while thinking about the context. 

Now, over the weeks, I have discussed the discourse over the removal of monuments regarding Olustee. I know that the United Daughters of the Confederacy mostly funded the Confederate monument at the park. However, I am not sure about the one in Lake City that I discussed in Week 9. Over the past few weeks; I was more focused on what happened in the battle and the current debate over these monuments, along with the debate over the idea that changing monuments rewrites history. These monuments celebrate the Confederacy, which was a slave state. American history will always have that connection to the horror that is slavery, it is something to be educated on, not celebrated. 

Walsh, Colleen. "Historian Puts the Push to Remove Confederate Statues in Context." Harvard Gazette. June 19, 2020. Accessed March 27, 2021. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/06/historian-puts-the-push-to-remove-confederate-statues-in-context/.