Thanks for those three links to remembrances. I was privileged to know and learn from Bob Engs, mostly but not only concerning matters related to the struggle to save Fort Monroe from culturally and financially counterproductive overdevelopment. Once he even visited my house for lunch, after which he and I for a long time discussed Fort Monroe while sittin' on my dock of a bay--the same Chesapeake Bay that further south gives Fort Monroe its intrinsic, and now almost certainly doomed, sense of place. After the Army's Fort Monroe departure decision in 2005, it quickly became clear that Virginia intended to do the wrong thing with that place. Pretty soon it also became clear that public understanding--for that matter, my own understanding--involved little general awareness of that place's deep historical importance in the history of liberty. That is, people knew about, for example, the construction contributions of Lt. Robert E. Lee, the brief presence of Edgar Allan Poe, and the incarceration of Jefferson Davis. Yet in 2006, the first iteration of the evolving official planning for post-Army Fort Monroe contained only a few lines about history. In my view today, there were two fundamental problems. One was simply that Fort Monroe had for so long been an Army post that people mainly just thought of it that way. The other, though, was the problem that I believe and hope the Lemon Project engages. It's the problem that Annette Gordon-Reed often cites, and that the Smithsonian exhibition on Monticello's inhabitants combated: the problem of general unawareness that far from being a mass of nameless victims, the enslaved were individual Americans with individual agency--with individual lives, stories, and exertions, not to speak of contributions to the country's growing wealth and culture. So in 2006 it became imperative for Fort Monroe's defenders themselves to get better educated. This we tried to do. We turned to Bob Engs. We became Engs disciples. Next to me on my desk as I write is my much-written-in and heavily sticky-noted copy of "Freedom's First Generation." We promoted an Engs-wisdom-based broadening of general understanding of the stakes at Fort Monroe. By 2007, the authorities were forced to look up, or at least act like they were looking up, from their overdevelopment obsession. They felt forced to convene a panel of national and local historians, though of course they intended only PR cover and plausible deniability. Here's a paragraph from something I submitted in this forum after that symposium of January 2, 2008: QUOTE Inspired initially by Professor Engs, we have been talking like this for two years. In early January, we saw these lines of constructive revisionism validated and affirmed at a Fort Monroe symposium that included not only Professor Engs but William Alexander, Ed Ayers, Ira Berlin, Tommy L. Bogger, Jack Davis, Ervin L. Jordan, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, John Quarstein, Joseph Reidy, Carol Sheriff, and Lauranett Lee. UNQUOTE Unconscionably but unsurprisingly, the symposium moderator--a public official, not a scholar--literally and publicly forbade discussion of that constructive revisionism's implications for recalibrating the importance of the historic landscape, and for fully understanding the sense of place. Though almost all of that landscape--that is, not just the moated stone citadel--had been designated a national historic landmark a half-century earlier, Hampton's and Virginia's leaders grimly intended, then as now, to overdevelop much of it. So their agent, the symposium moderator, unethically headed off any potential for the panelists' stature to be lent to land on which her bosses, the politicians, wanted condos. The dishonesty reminded me of the Challenger disaster commission's leaders' efforts to suppress what the physicist Richard Feynman, armed with a glass of ice water and a shred of material, revealed about what happens to the shuttle's O-rings if you chill them. But Bob Engs chaired that Fort Monroe symposium panel, and Bob Engs wrote that report. And Bob Engs undermined the moderator's Potemkin imposition. He inserted prominently a line making plain that the panel knew that Fort Monroe's post-Army stakes involve the whole landscape, not just the stone fortress within it--and that in their judgment, the overall landscape mattered. The report was buried, of course. The symposium's PR value had already been extracted and exploited. And who needed anything implying big importance in a landscape that merely saw both the beginning of the start and the start of the end of American slavery? Today if you search "Engs" or "symposium" on the Fort Monroe Authority's Web site, you get no hits. But I don't need a computer search to remember what I learned from Bob Engs, or what a friend and encourager Bob Engs was, or what Bob Engs stood for, or what, both before and after that symposium, Bob Engs did for Fort Monroe. ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html