War, Death, and Remembrance: The Memory and Commemoration of the American Civil War

FAIN: BI-50042-06

University of Mississippi (University, MS 38677-1848)
John Neff (Project Director: March 2006 to January 2009)

Two one-week workshops for fifty community college faculty to explore the meaning of the Civil War to survivors in the North and the South through monuments, memorials, and cemeteries commemorating the conflict.

The proposed workshops consist of a combination of classroom instruction, workshops for skills acquisition, and guided interactions with Civil War monuments, battlefields and cemeteries in North Mississippi. In the years following the American Civil War, Northerners and Southerners struggled to understand their separate commemorations within a larger re-unified national context. As historians, through the exploration of memory, we share that struggle today. And because we can share it, because we can readily access the issues that motivated their struggle through the tangible result of their activities – the monuments, the battlefield parks, and the cemeteries – our community college faculty can as readily be trained to assist their students in understanding and, more importantly, engaging the struggle that remains the most enduring legacy of our Civil War.