If you’re up for it, here’s a very long, very sad, very powerful read about public history and living memory in Alabama. It touches on the need to memorialize, to remember, a touching “currency” of memory work, and ends with interesting comment on the spectator’s presence in such lieux de memoires. Have you ever experienced intense emotions in reenactment history? Something about this story collapses temporal and spacial distance. Perhaps it is not unusual for the reader to feel pain and sorrow for a history that still does not feel quite “past” in 2016.
Please give it a read here.
Jenn Leah Ko 