Memorializing Defeat: Remembering Civil Wars in Finland and USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Monuments, Memory, and Commemoration" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The consequence of the Civil Wars in Finland and USA differed from each other: the winning Finnish side, the Whites, organized violent revenge against the Reds, and almost 19,000 Reds died in POW camps or were executed immediately after the war. Until WWII, the Whites erected memorials representing their victory and ignoring the Red cause, but the Reds got their first official memorials on the eve of WWII. Defeated Southerners banded together in collective rituals that mourned the dead, and by the end of the 19th century, the former Confederacy extended its memorial landscape to public civic spaces that commemorated the Confederate foot soldier and their leaders. We will discuss and compare memorials to these two Civil Wars and the sides that lost the wars expressed a vast range of political sentiments, including state reconciliation, contemporary activism, and ideological distortion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Monuments, Memory, and Commemoration   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 331