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Reviewed by:
  • Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape
  • Lester P. Lee Jr.
Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape. By Paul A. Shackel. (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2003. Pp. 272. Cloth, $70.00; Paper, $26.95.)

In this critical study of public history, Paul A. Shackel, professor of anthropology, examines how a persistent theme in American history has influenced the commemoration of a watershed event. The persistent theme is race; the watershed event was the Civil War. As a defining moment, the Civil War shattered old political, economic, and social arrangements and ushered in new ones—not the least among them race relations. Before the Civil War, people of African descent were slaves. After the Civil War, African Americans were citizens. For black people, then, the Civil War was fought to set an enslaved people free and to make them equal citizens in the land of their birth.

But as whites sought a national reconciliation among themselves, they changed the meaning and purpose of the Civil War. No longer revered as a struggle over slavery, the Civil War was remembered in public monuments, cemeteries, parks, and museums as a tribute to white chauvinism and Southern patriotism. Shackel illustrates this change through the case study method. Chapter 1 provides an historical overview of the competition among Northern whites, Southern whites and African Americans for control of the memory of the Civil War. The critical turning point in that rivalry was Northern acceptance of Southern Jim Crow laws. African Americans were relegated to the margins of the national consciousness as racial segregation replaced slavery in the regulation of race relations.

In chapter 2 Shackel, who once worked as an archaeologist for the National Park Service, details the peripatetic history of the John Brown Fort in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. This controversial symbol of abolitionism waned in relevance to Northern whites during the Jim Crow era, but African Americans embraced the fort, incorporated it into their protest politics for equal rights, and kept it from falling into obscurity. In contrast, as Shackel skillfully discusses in chapter 3, Southern white heritage groups created the "faithful slave monument" movement as a means to depict slavery as a benign institution. The movement seized on the death of Heyward Shepherd, a free black who was shot during John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, to promote white Southern notions of black loyalty and subservience.

Chapter 4 successfully weaves three narratives into one to give an informed analysis of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial. The first narrative is the tribute to Shaw, the white colonel who commanded the black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. The second narrative is a commentary about the contribution [End Page 334] and bravery of African American soldiers to the Civil War. And the third narrative is a discussion about the ambiguities in the racial intent of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptor of the memorial.

In the fifth chapter Shackel captures the contradictions in the meaning of the Civil War as exemplified in the development of the Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia. Initially, Northerners were unwilling to celebrate a place where rebellious armies won two victories over loyal troops. Southerners, in comparison, regarded the area as hallowed ground where white men fought and died to uphold the principle of states' rights and not slavery. Government officials reconciled these differences by focusing on troop movements and by ignoring the African American contribution to the social history of the park.

The concluding chapter discusses the ongoing power struggle for control over meaning in the public history of the Civil War. White Southern heritage groups are continuing their efforts to dominate race relations while black civil rights organizations are still pressing for equal treatment. In the epilogue Shackel, also director of the Center for Heritage Resources at the University of Maryland, suggests some of the ways to make public history more racially inclusive and honest.

Shackel has written a conscientious book that deserves sustained engagement from students of American history and education.

Lester P. Lee Jr.
Northeastern University
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