From Stanford to Stone Mountain: U.S. History, Memory, and Monuments

The future of America's memorial landscape is a subject of intense debate. How do societies remember? Who built the nation's monuments and memorials, and to what ends? Can the meaning of a memorial change over time? In this course, we will survey the history of memorialization in the United States, paying close attention to the interplay of race, gender, and nationalism. Case studies include: the political uses of textbooks and memoirs; Civil War memory and the Lost Cause; the re-interpretation of slavery at historic sites; and the renaming movement on Stanford's campus.