Remembering Forgetting: A Monument to Erasure at the University of North Carolina

by Timothy J. McMillan

The following essay originally appeared in Silence, Screen and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information. This book is now available in paperback.

In 2001, I began teaching a first-year seminar titled “Defining Blackness.” My journey with that class and its descendants is intertwined with my relationship with the memorial landscape, concrete and virtual, of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In its initial year, the class decided to take as its focus the idea of how blackness, specifically American blackness, might mediate and alter how people experience the physical campus. In class discussions we surmised that there is a segregation of knowledge and of perception that might become manifest by examining the memorial landscape and that there are aspects of the campus that might be invisible to some but highly charged to others. Continue reading “Remembering Forgetting: A Monument to Erasure at the University of North Carolina”

“No Savage Shall Inherit the Land”: The Indian Enemy Other, Indiscriminate Warfare, and American National Identity, 1607-1783

by Walter L. Hixson

 

US Foreign Policy and the Other

John Quincy Adams warned Americans not to search abroad for monsters to destroy, yet such figures have frequently habituated the discourses of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. Foreign Policy And The Other focuses on counter-identities in American consciousness to explain how foreign policies and the discourse surrounding them develop. This excerpt, adapted from Chapter 1. “No Savage Shall Inherit the Land”: The Indian Enemy Other, Indiscriminate Warfare, and American National Identity, 1607-1783, looks at how Native Americans, as the primary and quintessential American other, proved central to forging national identity. This book is now available in paperback.

Continue reading ““No Savage Shall Inherit the Land”: The Indian Enemy Other, Indiscriminate Warfare, and American National Identity, 1607-1783”

Does Every Vote Count In America? Emotions, Elections, and the Quest for Black Political Empowerment

by Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson

The following excerpt was adapted from chapter 11 in the book Emotions in American History: An International Assessment edited by Jessica C. Gienow-Hecht, published in 2010.


 

The history of emotions provides important keys to understanding human behavior and can be of great assistance in explaining wider political, social, and economic trends in American history.1 This applies in particular to the history of African Americans, as racial conflicts in general and the black struggle for freedom and equality in particular repeatedly stirred public emotions in the United States to a degree hardly ever reached by other domestic issues. Thus, interracial relations have always been identified as an extremely emotionally charged aspect of American history, and in view of the new approaches to historical research proposed by the history of emotion, a closer examination of this phenomenon can offer significant additional insights into the close connection between emotions and politics. A broad and multifaceted cluster, such as the Civil Rights Movement or any other social protest movement, encompasses emotions on various levels and should therefore be analyzed from more than one perspective. Continue reading “Does Every Vote Count In America? Emotions, Elections, and the Quest for Black Political Empowerment”