On Contentious Ground
The American Civil War remains a polarizing and formative event in American history and memory, one that still clearly marks a divisive fissure in the United States. Every year, millions of Americans visit the sites where thousands fell fighting to either uphold white supremacy or to break the chains and give birth to a new freedom, one more closely aligned with the universality proposed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution: that all people are created equal.
Like many children who grew up along the East Coast of the United States, my father often took us to different American historical sites during family vacations. Civil War sites held a certain amount of intense gravity. Their histories and stories commanded my attention as a child; the number of dead and suffering on and off the battlefield seemed unresolvable.
Starting with an early fascination with the Civil War and continuing to today, my research and revisiting of these sites acts as an investigation into my own fascinations with the war, the Union, and the Confederacy, while examining and interrogating both individual and collective memories of the war. What can images of visitors and the landscapes tell us about our relationship to a past as it continues to form for our stories as Americans?
