Trevor Colbourn Hall 325: CHDR 325

Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York examines the stories behind New York City's Civil War soldiers' monuments. Although historians have suggested that Union commemoration was largely uncontested, New York's monuments reveal a much more fractious story. My book argues, through a careful exploration of the machinations of multiple stakeholders, that New York's Union monuments were products of Gilded Age New York's notoriously bruising municipal politics. Indeed, many of these monuments were riddled with corruption, fraud, and spoils system patronage. The book traces the political and aesthetic conflicts that shaped the city's Civil War monuments, as well as notable opportunities, some realized and some not, to address the contributions of African American servicemen in public sculpture.

Akela Reason is Associate Professor of History and Director of Museum Studies at the University of Georgia, where she teaches American material and visual culture. Her first book, Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History (U. Penn Press, 2010), won the 2011 Southeastern College Art Conference Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication.