Beyond the Confederacy: Who Remembers What When in Berlin and Richmond?

Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, contains the United States' most comprehensive and controversial set of memorials commemorating the Confederacy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women as well as men from families that had formerly owned slaves enjoyed roles as public figures by working to keep the memory of the Confederacy alive, including by championing the erection of statues like these. This activism helped enable subsequent female family members to become public intellectuals and scholars. Scholarship on the origins of the approach enshrined in a celebrated series of memorials erected in Berlin following German reunification by one such woman suggests that Richmond's series of monuments might be reconfigured to foster a more inclusive approach to the history of the Civil War by sharply contrasting fragments of the current memorials with new content that addresses African American and other Unionist perspectives on the conflict.