Confederate Memory in Post-Confederate Atlanta—a Prolegomena

Abstract

ABSTRACT The landscape surrounding a memory site strongly influences how it is perceived by the people who visit it. As landscapes are prone to change over time, it is important to acknowledge the ways that such change exerts influence over visitors’ experiences. Through a historically oriented in situ investigation of Atlanta’s Civil War commemoration sites, I reconstruct a narrative from that city’s history that demonstrates how changing contexts, physical and social, can influence both the use of memory sites and the construction of future memory sites. I suggest that change in these sites’ fragmented surroundings prompted the construction of new monuments that were chiefly informed by ideological inadequacies created by transformed landscapes at older memory sites.