Ms. Blessman, thanks. I'm glad you agree that if the panel is to "explore
how we remember the Civil War and its meaning for Virginia and its people,"
as you put it yesterday, then an important discussion topic is the post-Army
fate of the historic landscape of Fort Monroe, now being warned about
belatedly but emphatically by the National Parks Conservation Association.
Below the dashed line appears another question that I hope your panel will
consider (and another that I hope you'll forward in any case to panelist
Risen at the Times, since all of this needs national attention now that
Virginia has failed so dismally in both its land and civic-memory
stewardship duties).
Thanks for hearing me out. With the loss of sense of place at Fort Monroe
about to be cemented for the coming thousand years, it just seems to me that
these matters compel attention from any panel discussing how we remember the
Civil War and its meaning for Virginia and its people--except that it's the
whole country, and for that matter the whole planet, that will suffer this
memory loss about the history of liberty itself.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/
http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/science_and_the_media
- - - - - - - -
POSSIBLE QUESTION FOR THE PANEL: Isn't the routinely told version of the
1861 Fort Monroe freedom story both feeble and inadvertently racist? Adam
Goodheart's New York Times feature story "How Slavery Really Ended in
America" starts with three Black self-emancipating men standing up and
taking action on May 23, 1861. Yet some historians and most politicians
still celebrate May 24, when a white general merely reacted--cleverly, yes;
constructively, yes; but merely within the filthy constraints of the obscene
slavery laws that trapped him. The self-emancipators, on the other hand,
obviously acted, not reacted, under the laws of nature and of nature's god.
Civic memory now increasingly recognizes that it was self-emancipating
Blacks who forced emancipation onto the nation's agenda--it was Blacks who,
acting bravely, naturally and without prompting, initiated the
transformation of the Civil War into a struggle for the human rights invoked
but scanted more than four score years earlier. So I hope the panel
discusses why, in 2013, we still tend to give the dignity of naming to Gen.
Butler while withholding that dignity from Frank Baker, James Townsend and
Sheppard Mallory. Don't they, like Fort Monroe itself, exert profound
symbolic power? Yes, Gen. Butler and the white politics of emancipation were
important, but isn't the most important memory to be found in the people who
set all of that into motion? And isn’t that why panelist Ayers told a
Chronicle of Higher Education reporter that what began on May 23, 1861, at
Fort Monroe was "the most important moment in American history"?
-----Original Message-----
From: Jennifer Blessman
Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2013 3:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Panel discussion
Great question! I do know that there will be time at the conclusion to ask
questions. We will be holding a final meeting tomorrow and I'll bring up
whether we want to have the panel take audience questions in advance. I'll
let you know what the verdict is tomorrow.
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