Thanks, Professor Meyers, for this update and for your related work at William and Mary, all of which seem to me to contribute to the scholarly but also civic cause of retrospectively conferring respect and dignity on those from whom the quarter-millennium-long crime of enslavement stole those and much else.

I hope I may yet again tie the practical question of the future of post-Army Fort Monroe to a directly related posting in this forum. I'd like to remind participants that not only was that strategic sand spit the location of what Edward L. Ayers has called "the greatest moment in American history" in 1861, nearly a quarter of a millennium after 1619, but that it was also the first stopping point in 1619 of the captive Africans whose descendants initiated the moment. 

As Adam Goodheart has emphasized, the moment was not set into motion by a constructive, astute, but ultimately merely reactive white general, as traditionally told in the spirit of a Gone-with-the-Wind-ism that seems to me to retain whiffs of antebellum presumptions of Black inferiority. Instead, President Ayers's moment was set into motion by brave, enterprising Black people standing up and reaching for freedom, and in the process revalidating national founding principles' origins in the laws of nature and of nature's god.

If President Ayers is even close to right about that spit of land, then I submit that it's self-evidently preposterous -- not to speak of economically costly -- that our country has, so far, only designated as a national monument (or national park) the parts of it that were mainly unthreatened by counterproductive overdevelopment in the first place. 

For a quick visual sense of the preposterousness, please see the photo-and-map illustration at the "idea" posting "Please unify nat'l monument by including missing bayfront acres" in the Fort Monroe Authority's online civic discussion and debate at http://ideas.fmauthority.com/fort-monroe-authority-describe-what-fort-monroe-means-to-you/please-unify-nat-l-monument-by-including-missing-bayfront-acres . Be sure to click on the plus sign in the illustration. 

That "idea" posting won more than four times more public support than any other, and literally 90 times more support than any of the few defenses of overdevelopment. Yet the deciders, despite their recent lip-service resolution in Hampton, still plan to disrupt the sense of place at this four-centuries-old American (and world) treasure. They still plan to conduct development smack in the middle of its Chesapeake Bay sense-of-place-defining waterfront -- even though, as the illustration cited above shows, there'll still be plenty of development in any scenario.

Professor Meyers, your program shows that Hampton's Mayor Ward will offer an opening greeting. She often takes great public credit for having engineered the present split national monument -- a split that almost every engaged stakeholder in this controversy believes is a big error. As far as I know, not one American historian has ever stood up for the sense of place that, if not fixed now or very soon, will be taken away forever by private Big Money via the cementing of the split. 

(The National Trust for Historic Preservation chose long ago to countenance overdevelopment, which it claims will be "compatible." But as the "idea" posting mentioned above explains, certain conservative and liberal local leaders know better.)

I hope somebody asks Mayor Ward about the self-evidently preposterous split, and I hope the assembled historians ask themselves about it too. 

If you want to celebrate 1619, now is the time to link it to this threatened national treasure that says more about Black self-emancipation and dignity, and thus also about America's Civil War transformation, than any site on the continent.

Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia

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