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so this is from me & @Lollardfish and the main point is that how we tend to think about monuments can be divided into categories of "nostalgia" & "memory." #twitterstorians #medievaltwitter #monuments (thread) 1/ https://twitter.com/SmithsonianMag/status/1281409062299750405
"nostalgia" is a tricky term because it has a popular association with something good. but it isn't. nostalgia is bad because it's about an invented past. 2/
see here for more, including Kraft Mac & Cheese as example https://twitter.com/prof_gabriele/status/980800196350300162?s=20
see here for more, including Kraft Mac & Cheese as example https://twitter.com/prof_gabriele/status/980800196350300162?s=20
monuments are erected at particular moments to cement (pun intended) a specific version of the past into people's minds. in doing so, it effaces the mess around that person's/ event's messiness and humanity. 3/
RE Lee becomes ONLY a general or university president and not a slaveowner and traitor. confederate soldiers become simple boys who fought for a lost cause not willing abettors of a proto-fascist slave state. 4/
and this applies outside the US as well, of course. why is there a big statue of Pope Urban II in Clermont-Ferrand for example? when was it put up? why?
is it weird that it is almost exactly contemporary with that of Lee in Richmond? 5/
is it weird that it is almost exactly contemporary with that of Lee in Richmond? 5/
you see that playing out in St. Louis in a weird way, around a statue of a 13th-century king. 6/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-statue-st-louis-namesake-underscores-battle-between-nostalgia-and-history-180975273/
the statue itself has a weird history, erected after the World's Fair in 1904 in honor of the city's name. it's of a saint but NEVER (until very recently) with any religious associations at all. But... 7/
it's clear from the documentation that the statue was designed to be martial in spirit - as a "crusader," to capture the idea of Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal that was policy in the late 19th- & early 20th centuries. 8/
indeed the statue was designed by the same guy who designed the equestrian statue at NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST'S grave in Memphis. yeah the KKK guy. 9/
let that sink in for a minute. 10/
so here in June/ July 2020 the defenders of the statue are trying to make a claim that dissociates the statue from (a) its, and (b) the subject's past. 11/
the priest who "gave a history lesson" wasn't entirely wrong (though he was racist, more on that in a minute) but is trying to say that the statue and person ONLY MEAN THIS ONE THING. 12/ https://twitter.com/joelcurrier/status/1276943472809906179?s=20
(the racism is in his comment about Africans and Arabs. he's trying to get solidarity with the BLM group by saying that Arabs murdered Africans and Louis "avenged" them somehow, but the crowd isn't having it. they know the past.) 13/
but the protestors are saying no, he's more than that. as @Lollardfish and me lay out in our piece. Louis helped the poor but also viciously persecuted Jews and tried to kill as many Muslims as he could. 14/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-statue-st-louis-namesake-underscores-battle-between-nostalgia-and-history-180975273/
history is always "revisionist" - it always brings in other perspectives, it always should consider other/ more evidence. it is never ever names and dates (and F standardized testing for making it seem that way in a lot of education) 15/
so the protestors are challenging a narrative with more soruces, different perspectives. this happens when you "allow" more people into the public sphere. wrote about a similar thing within #medievaltwitter a while ago. 16/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewgabriele/2018/07/14/history-medieval-studies-haunts-study-past/#17b0d8046b52
the debate here then isn't so much about the past as about who can talk about the past. protesters/ BLM are forcing us to have a conversation that white society doesn't want to have because it's unsettling. 17/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-statue-st-louis-namesake-underscores-battle-between-nostalgia-and-history-180975273/
but they're doing history. 18/
(it's incidentally the same thing with the Harper's letter - the signers are trying to gatekeep by claiming others are gatekeeping. it's projection.) 19/
but as MR Trouillot reminds us, history is often made - MADE - by those who take it in their own hands. those who are challenging the monuments are challenging the moment of their creation, the ossification of the past. 20/ https://twitter.com/prof_gabriele/status/981684597573476353?s=20
and when nostalgia breaks apart in the face of history, it allows us - historians and everyone else - to have a more honest conversation about what the past actually was. 21/21
