The Shifting of American Collective Memory: Remembering the Civil War Along the Mason-Dixon Line

Abstract

Recent years have seen waves of vandalism against Confederate memorials throughout America. Rather than condemning the violence, the mayors of Baltimore, St. Louis, and various other cities have chosen to remove the monuments from prominent public spaces. Clearly, the current cultural climate is anti-Confederate. But when did it become this way? By studying six newspapers, three mainstream (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Indianapolis Star, and the Baltimore Sun) and three of African-American signature (the St. Louis Argus, the Indiana Recorder, and the Baltimore Afro-American), this thesis traces the collective memory of the American Civil War in three cities along the Mason-Dixon Line. The most important finding is that, contrary to the dominant view in the historiography, the 1954-68 Civil Rights Movement did not manifestly alter American collective memory of the Civil War. Whilst relevant changes in collective memory were found in the period 1965-2014, the dominant memory of the Civil War as morally neutral conflict only fell in 2015.