Re: WHAT ARE YOU READING RIGHT NOW?
Underground Atlanta looks cool. You need to enjoy your history whilst you are still allowed to.
Following the removal of Confederate statues, there have been demands to destroy national monuments here in England, starting with Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Liberals claim he was a bad fellow and deserves to be demonised and eradicated from celebrated history because he supported slavery. In actual fact he died for his country at Trafalgar and his victory in that battle gave Britain command of the high-seas and so were able to enforce Wilberforce's Slavery Abolition Act and eradicate the transportation of slaves, effectively killing the business outside of the USA.What next? The Roman empire was built upon slavery... we should knock down the Colosseum, the Acqua Marcia, Basilica of Maxentius Constantine and Baths of Caracalla?
The Pyramids in Egypt were definitely constructed using slave power. Level those sites?
The world seems to have gone mad.
The latest great personally staggering 
development? People are calling to ban Gone with the Wind -- the book, the movie from public theaters! I tell you, the smelling salts are out.
Here's my thinking. Everybody wants control of the narrative, and for a LONG time, that narrative has been controlled by white men -- usually white men with money. I agree it's an issue.
The answer isn't to jerk the narrative back, and rewrite some new sort of half-narrative. The answer is to expand the narrative. Not dishonestly, giving the spotlight to the parts you like, but honestly. Easier said than done, where history has been lost to the archives, but really, people. It needn't be a competition. Just get the truth out there -- the bad, the ugly, the complex, the ironic. People can be both courageous and ridiculous. That's the truth. Just tell what happened.
My book from a recent survey class on American History reads like something out of the 1950s, Dill, and it's supposed to be the updated version! Every chapter is all about the white male history of the era. For example, "here's what happened in the twenties" is a chapter. Each chapter about what happened to white men is followed by about a paragraph each on what white women were doing at the same time; what Native-Americans were doing {usually men}; what African-Americans were doing {usually men}; what immigrants were doing {usually men}. ALL IN TIDY SEPARATE BOXES. And guess what? These little paragraphs are all about the groups' reactions to what white men were doing at the time. It's like the editors think if they tuck in a token "women count too, and here's how in under twenty words," they will have given an accurate history.
Meanwhile, none of that was happening in a tidy box at the end of the white male narrative. It was all weaved in, happening in tandem, pushing back and pulling in and inspiring and disrupting the white male narrative. The way the book writes it is remarkably segregationist, & it changes the way the history reads.
When I was poring through female history in the Early Modern era a few years ago, I found ALL KINDS of articles by women scolding men for untidy patriarchal behavior in 1600s London. They were in newspaper articles written by women, intended for all men in London to read by fireside, & they're long-lost to old archives. Those ladies had spirit! And the men often responded in kind, publically teasing back as if this was all very normal. The fact that we haven't printed the female voice doing this in history doesn't mean everyday women were quiet and orderly! It means people didn't tend to record the everyday female perspective in their history books, PROBABLY because they didn't want to encourage it. {I do realize we have books about queens. I'm talking the millions and millions of women who also existed, and weren't queens.} I'm thinking they printed the tidy everyday women, so the tidy women could act as examples for everyday women bold enough to read history in the first place, and that is what history remembers, for the most part. LOOK HOW NICE WOMEN USED TO BE. YOU LOT ARE UNRULY. {We have always been, I imagine.} As in, history has an agenda. Not history as it actually happened, but history as we've chosen to commemorate it.
My point being that we carve whole narratives out of the parts of history that work for our era's agenda. If we cut out the parts we don't like in 2017, we are doing exactly what history has always done -- telling our part of the tale, for future generations. I think it's a bad idea on either side: why revise the past? Just tell what actually happened! Including the ugly. Including the courageous. Including what seems wholly unmemorable to you.
I? Want the women in history acknowledged, unburied, remembered. Not just the suffragists or the ones who led the marches. Not just the Jane Austens {although good on England for commemorating her!} I want the quiet ones who dedicated their lives to home and family remembered. The ones who gave birth year after year after year, filling the world with the men we remember, and died at only thirty-seven, their bodies spent and exhausted -- remembered. They lived. They contributed. They have been all but erased. I realize it's a pipe dream: people want to remember the ones who fought in the public sphere, and that was {through no fault of their own} very rarely women. But I want it. However, I do not want a world where we have female monuments everywhere and no memory of the rest of history. What then are we commemorating? Women in a vacuum? It would be a fraction of the tale.
Here in Atlanta we have monuments to the Confederates at our State Capitol building, and a huge {extremely controversial} monument to the Confederacy at Stone Mountain {it's like Mount Rushmore, but for the Confederates}. We also have monuments to Martin Luther King Jr., as well as a museum and church dedicated to his life and work. We have little markers on random buildings citing, for example, the old Confederate Armory, or a place where Sherman passed; we have statues of African-American people holding hands for generations on the streets; a huge image of a phoenix showing Atlanta rising up out of the ashes; an active tour within Underground Atlanta -- the old Atlanta buried under the new. All of that {and more} is this city's voice, for better or worse. If we cut out a part of it, we are telling only a part of the story. Better to place the face of courageous opposition beside that of Alexander Stephens, than to erase Stephens altogether. Carve Martin Luther King's face on Stone Mountain. Find women in Georgia history and carve them there too. Celebrate how far we have come, and give the future a face to remember.
Burning monuments, banning Gone with the Wind, tearing down isn't the answer. Building up is the answer. I read Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone and loved it. That's how to respond to what you view as romanticized history: add your voice. Randall basically stands alongside Mitchell's novel and says, "All right, but what if Scarlett had a mulatto sister?" How can she ask that question if we bury Gone with the Wind? And if we bury Gone with the Wind, we bury its feminist strength, its narrative to a Depression-era America, its representation of what that era valued, its voice on the South where it stood. The many, many, many moments within the novel when a granddaughter of the Confederacy clearly critiques the Confederacy. Which means we bury the potential to learn, to debate, to grow. History shows us the journey we've taken as humans -- the ugly steps, the courageous steps, the staggering steps we've taken to now. And to your point, we bury human complexity. I realize I am being wholly controversial when I say that I believe there were good people on the Confederate side, and bad people on the Northern side. And certainly vice-versa. I think people can be courageous and also quite selfish. All within one life. Black or white. Because people are complex. Good people in history have agreed to fight in defense of reprehensible things. That is a fact. I cannot even imagine what it must feel like here in Atlanta to walk by the State Capitol and see the monument of a man on a horse who fought to keep my great-grandmother in bondage. I believe it would cut me through to the core, because I would know that but for the fate of the courageous who stood up for right, I would be a slave. Nothing would have changed.
So I understand why the fight is happening: the monuments tell only part of the story. They commemorate a past from a single perspective. To commemorate that perspective on the lawn of the Georgia Capitol feels like an anachronistic insult to those many, many people who can claim an enslaved ancestor. The answer isn't to tear the monuments away. Put more truth alongside them. Let us learn the whole story. Every single monument is heaped with history. Heaped with the unsaid. So say it. Scream it! Add to the narrative. Challenge the narrative. Shake the narrative. Don't erase the narrative, or all we will have left is a sanitized version of a stormy, brutal, and in many ways remarkably courageous history. We will have only a part of history, which means we will not have changed at all.
