The tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, have re-ignited debate about the place of Confederate monuments in public spaces, as well as related conversations about the role of Confederate, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist imagery in American political culture. Historians have been a vocal presence in these discussions and the American Historical Association is compiling an ongoing bibliography of the diverse perspectives of AHA members.
The AHA has also released the following statement about the role of history and historians in these public conversations. Rather than seeking to provide definitive answers to the questions posed by individual monuments, the AHA emphasizes the imperative of understanding historical context in any consideration of removing or recontextualizing monuments, or renaming public spaces.
Read full statement on historians.org:
The following Affiliated Societies have endorsed our statement on Confederate monuments:
American Journalism Historians Association
French Colonial Historical Society
Labor and Working Class History Association
North American Conference on British Studies
Organization of American Historian
Social Welfare History Group
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Society for Italian Historical Studies
The Society for the Study of Southern Literature
Western Society for French History
World History Association
This post first appeared on AHA Today.
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