“History by the Spoonful” in North Carolina: The Textual Politics of State Highway Historical Markers

Memorials and monuments retell the past through a variety of visual media, but especially through words, narratives, and other textual references. Surprisingly, geographers have devoted limited attention to interpreting the actual phrases inscribed into places of memory and how these narratives lie at the heart of the struggle to be remembered (or forgotten) for social groups traditionally excluded from dominant representations of public history. Employing a pedagogical framework called “textual politics,” I describe two projects in which my students engaged the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program. The first project involved a group of students conducting a content and discourse analysis of the inscriptions found on North Carolina roadside markers and identifying important social changes but also continuing injustices in the depiction of slavery and African Americans. In the second project, a student and I partnered with a non-profit community development organization in New Bern, North Carolina to apply for the establishment of a highway marker that would retell the history of a major early 20^th century fire and its impact on the city’s African American population. The marker application was unsuccessful, shedding light on the obstacles that face efforts to rewrite, literally and politically, landscapes of public memory.