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Title
Description
This archive contextualized how the Confederate Soldiers’ Home and Memorial Park at Mountain Creek, Alabama historically and contemporarily forwarded the Lost Cause narrative. However, the memorial as having been a soldiers’ home made its history a difficult one in how Confederate veterans housed there were simultaneously “indigent” and deliberate collaborators throughout said narrative's development. Accordingly, each artifact disclosed the various individual and institutional agents which comprised this memorial’s stakeholders, and how their interests became conjoined with the veterans’ in their Lost Cause memorialization. As this memorial provided those stakeholders with a milieu necessary for such action, ideas which have been transmitted across generations of Alabamians, it affirmed historian Randall B. Rosenberg’s notion of soldiers’ homes as “living monuments” still alive long after their last inmates died [1]. Just as this memorial outlived the veterans it once housed, so did their Lost Cause narrative survive into our contemporary period of history.
This archive is useful for one’s understanding of what a soldiers’ home was and its significance to post-Civil War Southern ideology. Unlike other entries in the larger monument-map, this memorial housed Confederate veterans and thereby provided them with a grounding for their Lost Cause narrative. Emphasis on Alabama's natural resources within its construction directly anchored stakeholders’ identities to the soldiers' home complex itself. That process continued through the memorial park and its neo-Confederate ideology. Hence, this archive re-emphasized said “living monument” as a significant type within the larger discourse about Confederate monuments in public and U.S. history.
Creator
Source
- Randall B. Rosenberg, Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers’ Homes in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xiii and 107.
References
- Blight, David W. American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.
- Confederate Soldiers' Home and Memorial Park Bibliography.
- Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Vintage, 2000.
- Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. New ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.