The fight over the Confederate monuments has inaccurately framed as people trying to destroy history and those who wish to destroy it. For an example of the ongoing debate, inside the Washington National Cathedral, which serves as a national church that serves all faiths, rests two stained-glass windows to honor the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. After church leadership defended the controversial windows for years, they no longer believe that it holds a place within the church walls. Proponents of removing the stain stained-glass windows often found in the minority were ridiculed as destroyers of history. After two years of trying to decide, in an official announcement published by the Washington National Cathedral, church leadership makes known their decision to remove the monument. The church claims the reason for the postponement was that the leadership within the church looked for alternative solutions, primarily through trying to contextualize the windows. The church ultimately claimed that the windows didn’t fit into the national spiritual values which therefore warranted their removal. As per the removal, just as these stained-glass windows are to represent the wounded history of the United States, they are not to be destroyed but to be preserved in a museum. What happened to the stained-glass windows is a precedent that needs to be set and followed. The removal of unwanted Confederate monuments needs not to lead in destruction, but rather a re-appropriation.

On May 11^th 2017, the City of New Orleans removed its statue of Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederacy.  Jefferson Davis’s statue was removed due to its pro-slavery and discriminatory subtext, but this removal met significant resistance by those claiming Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy as part of local history and heritage. New Orleans has not yet designated a place or forum for the statue to be displayed, so for now, it remains in storage of some kind. This begs the question, what are we to do with historical monuments that have been or will be removed? One proposal is that these monuments should be placed in a museum type setting that can provide a better context for this monument and others like it. As part of this contextualization, curators need to make a distinction between the depicted figures in their respective eras and the creators of the statue in their respective era. In this particular instance, Jefferson Davis’s monument was installed in 1911, a full fifty years after Davis declared his presidency and in the heat of segregation and Jim Crow laws. Because of the later date of this installment, the monument can be seen as a representation of the revisionist history of post-Reconstruction. Another curatorial addition for this particular monument would be the public’s response to it; for instance, someone graffitied “slave owner” across the  base of the statue for all to see. By doing this, curators could display responses of the public, both in protest of and in defense of this monument.

The posts below stem from a quick in class exercise after reading the first third of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. We’re grappling with this book this week because it suggests how history is produced and the variety and extent of history’s production and reception in public. Trouillot’s thoughts on what and how history is constituted are clear (or, as you see from student reactions, perhaps less clear than we might like,) but we’re also thinking together this week about the practical implications of this text for the public historian on a day-to-day basis.

One of the most striking aspects from chapter one of Trouillot’s Silencing the Past is the partition of the concept of history into two categories — the facts of the matter and the narrative that coincides with those facts. Often there is a discrepancy between the facts and the narrative, leading to controversy surrounding the actual events. Trouillot also explains the impact of narratives themselves, and states that one of the functions of a collectivity in a society is to distinguish between the accepted narrative and the fictitious. Trouillot places an emphasis on the role of power in the distillation of a historical narrative and outlines why historical theories such as positivism and constructivism are flawed in their viewpoints.

First and foremost trouillot’s writing was a bit of a slog but an at least fairly straight forward slog until his side track into what almost seems like a rant on constructionists and the Holocaust which in terms of his argument is still valid, but doesn’t quite fit the narrative structure that had up until that point been laid down. From what I gathered his argument is mostly that in history there are two sides to the story, what happened and what people think happened.

Reaction to Trouillot’s Silencing the Past:

In reading Trouillot’s preface and second chapter of his book Silencing the Past I was confronted with questions. Questions of my own and questions that Trouillot himself often posses at the end of a topic.

•  Brash analysis, “talking about dead Indians” p 9
• The man who survived the Alamo, focus on the historical event and not with the origin of historical memory. Yet is concerned with the modern efforts to face these memories as with Davy.
• Exclusion of one’s history that not have memory of.

 

How narratives of particular events come to fruition, and who created them, are interesting points in Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. Whether or not today’s historians were influenced by Silencing the Past, public memory has become a major field for historians.

Trouillot, the author of Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History, looks at the different ways in which cultures and individuals have grappled with history. Trouillot asks the reader to examine the different interpretations of history by attempting to nail down what a “fact” truly is and how elusive that definition is. I found Trouillot’s example of how the stories and narratives can change base on the way in which the listener interprets the question very fascinating to ponder.

As promised, this was a heavy reading. Not heavy in the sense of the volume of material, but rather the density of the work and the way in which it is written. In this piece, Trouillot is pondering ideas of history, its truthfulness, and the differences that abound from the narrative taught by two conflicting factions of historians. His case study of sorts centers around the Alamo, a story that is known, at least in part, to most of us in the Americas. It is through the lens of both positivist and constructivist views of history that the author examines the events that took place at the Alamo. The author questions the truthfulness of the narrative, much like a constructivist historian, but his goal is to bring about truth not polluted by social historical contexts, and to explore the differences between the two practices of history, their limitations and expand the narrative in an accurate manner. He draws attention to the biases that enter into the historical context

In this reading of Trouillot (my 6th I think–that’s less bragging than me admitting how this text rewards and demands repeated readings,) I thought a lot about what Trouillot would think about public history. He certainly talks about history and the public, and at some points even talks about professional public historical practice. But I think he’s most concerned with an expansive definition of what public history is and how we might use it to conceptualize our experience in the world.

In general, I think Trouillot is a necessary manual for the public historian who is interested not only in the big picture of thinking about how history is made, conceived, and interpreted, but also as an example of the way in which history enters into quotidian life on a daily basis. I’m still thinking about how that works practically.