Ken Burns gives a great response to the Confederate Monuments debate. I’ll have to keep this in mind for the next time the topic comes up in our Round Table group.

At one point, Tulane professor Walter Isaacson asked, “Do you think that by pulling down these monuments we’re losing some feel for history?” Burns responded, “No, we’re actually increasing our feel for history. We’re making it much more dimensional. We’re asking other people who have been involved in this narrative, who have systematically and consciously been excluded from the narrative to come in and have a place…”

Source: Ken Burns and the Importance of Portraying History Through Film

I mentioned David Blight’s discovery of the first Memorial Day yesterday. For those who don’t know the story, here’s a NYTimes article written by the historian himself that goes into detail.

Sidenote: I first heard about this in one of Blight’s speeches at historical conferences and symposiums, many of which are available on Apple’s wonderful iTunes U. His off-the-cuff speaking style can be a bit digressive, but the content of his talks is always worth a listen.

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.

Source: Forgetting Why We Remember – The New York Times