The focus of this presentation is on the American Civil War monument in New York City. Drawing from my experience researching, photographing, transcribing and analyzing approximately one hundred monuments in the five boroughs, I will demonstrate that the city’s Civil War monumentation merits consideration as a complex text. Indeed, this archive warrants collective examination from a multi-disciplinary perspective, including American studies, history, and as a verbal and visual art form. Other forms of media command public attention today, but I will argue that, symbolically and practically, these monuments continue to occupy and govern public space in ways that other forms of media cannot achieve. I will present a survey of this multifaceted collected text. The overview I offer will be juxtaposed with brief appraisals of particular, distinctive examples, such as the five statues or portrait busts of Abraham Lincoln, two statues of Frederick Douglass; the common soldier monuments in the Bronx (Woodlawn Cemetery), Queens (173rd Street and Hillside Avenue; Calvary Cemetery), Manhattan (89th Street and Riverside Drive), and Brooklyn (Green-wood Cemetery). I will also consider pertinent portrait busts in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at Bronx Community College. This presentation will call attention to the power of terse, fragmentary verbal texts and visual imagery to reveal multi-layered meanings and implications. By focusing on selected monuments in the five boroughs, I will contend that this genre provides a distinctive insight into the ways in which nineteenth century New York confronted mortality and fate, as well as the morals, ethics and politics of the age. I will also apply those considerations to the present day by positing a continuity between New York in the past and New York in the present day.
About the presenterTimothy S. Sedore
Timothy S. Sedore is an ordained minister and serves as Professor of English at The City University of New York, Bronx Community College, where he teaches composition, literature and religious rhetoric. His book, An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments was published in 2011 by the Southern Illinois University Press. His recent research to date includes book-length studies of Tennessee and Mississippi Civil War monuments.