Civil War History is Factual, But Fluid
- Submitted by: Love Knowledge
- Category: Politics
Statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army and early member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Photo credit: Ron Cogswell / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The post Civil War History is Factual, But Fluid appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.
It is said that winners write history. In the case of the US Civil War it’s a bit more complicated. For the sake of uniting a divided country, the losers of the war have been allowed to cling to their own narrative of what happened — and that is once again causing problems now.
Wars come and go, and it’s typically the job of cloistered historians to debate their consequences. But the US Civil War remains an open wound. Debates about it cut deep to the roots of what George Washington called the nation’s “great experiment.” Its history is a perpetual reminder of America’s original sin.
Where museums often house the memorabilia of other wars, monuments to the Civil War have been permanently seated in public squares throughout the United States — and in particular the South. The overwhelming majority were installed following the collapse of postbellum Reconstruction in the late 19th century and during the rise of Jim Crow in the early 20th century. The American Civil War Museum provides one of the the best collections of resources about these monuments and what they represent.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with Christy Coleman, the chief executive officer of the American Civil War Museum. Coleman exposes the false simplicity that pervades so many of our conversations about the fratricidal bloodbath. She also explains that the materials schools use to teach about the war divide North from South and East from West, and shows why it remains so difficult to agree on a single set of facts.
She also talks about the important roles that museums might play, as this debate once again moves to center stage.
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Full Text Transcript:
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| Jeff Schechtman: | Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman. |
| Because memory is imperfect, because traditions and stories are often altered as they’re passed down from generation to generation, because history is factual but fluid, we often build statues or preserve buildings as kind of triggers to our remembered past. Normally, this is played out in community battles over preservation versus progress, but when the subject is the Civil War, everything seems to change. Perhaps that’s as it should be, as the Civil War was, after all, the penultimate flash point of America’s original sin. While other wars come and go, often left to cloistered historians to debate, the Civil War, slavery, and the fabric of the republic are re-litigated over and over and over again. And so it goes today in the battle over statues that some see as the embodiment of all that’s wrong. | |
| We’re going to talk about all of this and try and put it in some kind of perspective today with my guest, Christy Coleman. She is the chief executive officer of the American Civil War Museum. She grew up in Williamsburg, has a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Hampton University. She wrote the script for the Emmy-Award-winning film Freedom Bound. It is my pleasure to welcome Christy Coleman to the program. Christy, thanks so much for joining us. | |
| Christy Coleman: | Thank you so much for having me. |
| Jeff Schechtman: | First of all, tell us a little bit about the American Civil War Museum. What is it, and a little bit about its history. |
| Christy Coleman: | Certainly. The American Civil War Museum is actually relatively new. I say relatively new because we are the consolidation of two museums, the Museum of the Confederacy and the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar. Both institutions came together in 2013-2014 with a new mission to be not only the preeminent center for the study of the American Civil War, but to explore this war from multiple perspectives, Union, Confederacy, African-Americans, enslaved and free, immigrant communities, soldiers, civilians, and political issues. We really looked for experience and a variety of choices that are made from an individual level, community levels, political and national levels, experience from the military, the things that happened on the battlefields. That’s who we are. It’s a big, big chunk- |
| Jeff Schechtman: | Indeed. |
| Christy Coleman: | … but it is probably … Yeah, it’s a … I was going to say probably. There isn’t any other place where visitors can really get that level of breadth with the work that we do. |
| Jeff Schechtman: | Given that you have been doing this for a while, what do you see as really the fundamental misunderstanding that people have with respect to understanding the Civil War? |
| Christy Coleman: | The biggest problem has always been simplicity. The biggest problem has always been this idea of a binary reality in that the Union fought the war to end slavery, the Confederacy fought the war to maintain it. While there are grains of truth for that, the reality was so much more complex. When the war began, there were a number of issues at play. Some say it was about states’ rights. |
Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Christy Coleman (NEH), American Civil War Museum (Ted Eytan / Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0) and Statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest (Ron Cogswell / Flickr – CC BY 2.0).
Read more https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/08/23/civil-war-still-fought-today/
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