Program date: August 19, 2020
In the resurgent national debate over history, memory and public statuary, Confederate monuments are now being removed—by governments and demonstrators alike—while a new reckoning has arrived for monuments to Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, the nation’s founders, and Abraham Lincoln. How far should this re-appraisal go? Is the “new iconoclasm” an attempt to erase history, or a long-deferred acknowledgment that white supremacy has inflected public memory as surely as it has poisoned civic life? Experts reflect on their own evolution in appraising this complex issue and discuss not only sculpture that is being torn down, but what might be built up in its place.
Allen C. Guelzo, a three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, serves as senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities and director of the Institute on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.
Brent Leggs is executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and the author of Preserving African American Historic Places. Edna Greene Medford is associate provost for faculty affairs, professor of history, and former chair of the History Department at Howard University, where she was also interim dean of arts & sciences.
Harold Holzer (moderator) has published more than 50 books on the Civil War era, including The Lincoln Image, The Confederate Image, and The Union Image. The winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the National Humanities Medal, he has written a number of recent opinion pieces on 2020 statue controversies.
Photo: (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) J. Scott Applewhite
