Department of History: In print or prospect
Thomas Adams | University of Sydney
In Print or Prospect: Engraving ‘Egalité: Notes on the Contemporary Urban Politics of Public History in the U.S.
Earlier this year, the New Orleans City Council began the first of more than forty names changes over the coming year to streets and parks that previously honored Confederate insurrectionists and those who actively denied Americans consitutional rights after the Civil War. This represents the largest transformation of an urban landscape of commemoration in American history.
In this talk, I discuss this process, of which I co-chaired the scholarly panel that identified names for removal and recommended potential replacement names–most of which have been adopted preliminarily. I pay special attention to the way we indentified names to be removed, our vision for replacement honorees, and the often suprising political contexts for this effort, while concluding with a discussion of the complicated politics of historians successfully transforming built environments and the quotidian enscription of historical meaning in public spaces.
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The Department of History hosts a lively departmental research seminar series. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Seminar details
8 September | 12.10 – 1pm
The seminar will run on Zoom
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The Department of History is part of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry (SOPHI)