General William Tecumseh Sherman Bronze Bas Relief Marching Through Georgia Civil War Memorial Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.C. Statue dedicated 1903, artist Carl Rohl-Smith. Located in back of Treasury where President Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant reviewed the Army at the end of the Civil War. General Sherman led the review at the head of the Army of Tennessee.
On Wednesday, Sept. 13, at 7 p.m. in the Athens County Public Library, Dr. Brian Schoen, Associate Professor of History, and Dr. Robin Muhammad, Associate Professor and Chair of African American Studies, will provide openning remarks for an Athens community roundtable on “Civil War Monuments in the 21st Century: Relevant Historical Artifacts or Relics of a Past Best Forgotten.”
The event is organized by as part of the regular meetings of the Gen. Charles H. Grosvenor Civil War Roundtable, which meets on the second Wednesday of every month. The Sept. 13 program will focus on “the recent controversies involving the removal, the relocation, and in a few cases, the destruction of Civil War monuments, mainly in the South.”
Schoen and Muhammad “will place these monuments in historical context by discussing when they were erected and what they represented to the people responsible for them.” After these opening remarks, those present will be encouraged to engage in a give-and-take discussion on the contested issue so much in the news. The event announcement included the following question as it encouraged the public to join the organized for what promises to be a vibrant and highly relevant conversation: If, as historian Carl Becker claimed long ago, “History is what the present chooses to remember about the past,” who and what do we wish to commemorate? How do we, as a society, deal with previous generations’ answers to those questions, both those that took form in the stone and bronze statues peppering our public landscape and those that never made it off the drawing board?
Read more about Schoen’s research and teaching interests on his department web page.
Read more about Muhammad’s reasearch and teaching interests on her department web page.
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