Public Memory, Commemoration, and Place: An Analysis of Confederate Monuments at the Gettysburg Battlefield
Author(s): Christina H. McSherry
Year: 2020
Summary
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
The location of the American Civil War Battle of Gettysburg, now preserved at the Gettysburg National Military Park (GNMP), receives thousands of visitors every year. When touring the battlefield, these visitors interact with hundreds of monuments across the landscape. The monuments both commemorate the actions that took place in July 1863 and memorialize the participants in those actions. This study focuses on monuments dedicated to Confederate actions and soldiers on the battlefield. Presented here are the preliminary results of a linguistic study of these monuments. The study focuses on the wording of the monuments to determine what message they convey to the public and how the Confederate actions and soldiers are memorialized. In addition, the study addresses the central role of place in the monuments’ message.
Cite this Record
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Place: An Analysis of Confederate Monuments at the Gettysburg Battlefield. Christina H. McSherry. 2020 ( tDAR id: 457391)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
Battlefield
•
Civil War
•
Memory
Geographic Keywords
United States of America
Temporal Keywords
Mid-19th Century
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 643