Teaching the Civil War: A Place-Based Learning Approach to Civil War Memory

This post is the second in a new Muster series that will highlight innovative ways that classroom instructors have approached teaching the Civil War era. Today’s post is written by Professor Ian Delahanty and offers a creative approach for introducing students to Civil War-era history through a place-based learning experience in Boston

 

For most of the students who take my survey of the Civil War era at the regional Western Massachusetts college where I teach, the Civil War is and always has been “down South.”  Even though the Springfield Armory National Historic Site, where a majority of the Union army’s rifles were produced, is a mere 20-minute walk from campus, most of my students feel little or no tangible connection to the war.  By contrast, many can share memories of visiting a museum or historic site in southern New England that enabled them to feel how their communities were shaped by major events in Early American History, including King Philip’s War, Shays’ Rebellion, the Industrial Revolution, and especially the American Revolution.  Thus, when designing a culminating research project for my Civil War era survey, I thought long and hard about how to immerse students in some aspect of the period in a way that would make them grasp what the war meant to contemporaries who, while far removed from its battlefields, were nonetheless invested in its prosecution and outcome.  In what follows, I describe a research project organized around a walking tour of Civil War monuments in downtown Boston and research in contemporary newspaper coverage in the Boston Globe of the monuments’ planning and dedication ceremonies.  Along the way, I offer suggestions for how this project might be adapted to any number of locales while remaining grounded in a pedagogy of Place-Based Learning.

The objectives for this project are twofold.  First, I want students to be able to demonstrate their knowledge of the various strands of Civil War memory, an objective they meet in the final product by identifying a particular strand of memory (or in some cases, strands of memory) encapsulated in the monuments, dedication speeches, and newspaper editorials that comprise the evidence base for their research.  Second, beyond the ability to identify what strand of Civil War memory a given monument or dedication speech most closely aligns with, students should be able to evaluate Boston’s landscape of Civil War memory in its totality.  They do this in an essay that synthesizes their observations of the monuments from our field trip with their research in the Boston Globe’s coverage of the monuments’ planning and dedication ceremonies.  Ultimately, students are tasked with explaining how Bostonians in the last third of the nineteenth century remembered the Civil War.

The groundwork for this culminating project is laid early in the semester.  In the first week of class, students are introduced to the concept of historical memory through excerpts from the French historian Pierre Nora’s essay “Between Memory and History” and a short video produced by Brown University’s Choices Program that succinctly maps out forms of collective memory.[1]  They also read David Blight’s “In Memory’s Mirror,” a short article that surveys historical memory of the Civil War at its 50^th, 100^th, and 150^th anniversaries.[2]  Thus, before the class delves into the narrative of the Civil War era, students gain familiarity with the concept of historical memory and the various, at times conflicting strands Civil War memory.  Over the next twelve weeks, as we proceed through the sequence of the antebellum period and Civil War, we periodically pause to reflect on an artifact or site of Civil War memory that is germane to a given lesson topic.  For instance, as part of a lesson on how Americans dealt with the unprecedented scale of death created by the war, the class visits a nearby cemetery that includes a Civil War soldiers’ burial plot centered around a “standing soldier” monument.[3]  That monument affords us the opportunity to revisit and reinforce the concept of historical memory and to practice interpreting a monument as a site of Civil War memory.

The culminating project begins in earnest about three-quarters of the way through the semester, by which time we’re transitioning into a focus on Reconstruction.  I teach the class in the spring semester, and in Massachusetts, this part of the schedule typically falls when it’s slightly less foolish to assume that a 1.5-hour bus trip to Boston won’t be cancelled due to snow.  Students begin the week by skipping ahead to the last chapter of our textbook, Gary Gallagher and Joan Waugh’s The American War, to read the authors’ explanation of the “four major interpretive traditions” of Civil War memory developed by the wartime generation: The Union Cause, the Emancipation Cause, the Lost Cause, and the Reconciliation Cause.[4]  Later in the week, we brave rush hour traffic on the Mass Pike and are dropped off in front of the Massachusetts State House.  There, we assemble beneath the equestrian statue of “Fighting” Joseph Hooker, which stands across the street from Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ renowned monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment.  From there, we embark on a roughly two-hour walking tour of historical monuments in downtown Boston dedicated to various individuals and groups who shaped the course of the Civil War era.  While my lesson is tailored to Boston’s monument landscape, this approach can be adapted to any place where there are numerous monuments to Civil War-era individuals, groups, or organizations within a reasonably close distance, whether on foot or by bus.  Combining Google Maps street view with a database of Civil War monuments could enable instructors to create a virtual tour of monuments in their vicinity; such a virtual tour might be necessary for differently abled students if the cityscape or landscape poses mobility challenges.[5]

The walking tour of Civil War monuments in downtown Boston is the first of two opportunities for students to conduct research in primary source evidence.  Grounded in a pedagogy of Place-Based Learning, the tour (and specifically, my line of questioning along the way) pushes students to connect the particularities of each monument with its geographical location and chronological context in the cityscape.[6]  Place-Based Learning immerses students in a space—a neighborhood pocket, a natural landscape, a museum, etc.—where they can observe and ideally interact with an issue or phenomenon they would otherwise learn about in a reading or class discussion.  In foregrounding space and place, it encourages students to see themselves as part of an environment whose terrain, resources, or narratives are shared and oftentimes contested.

Funded by a $55,000 grant from the state legislature and installed in 1903, the General Hooker Statue stands just outside the main public entrance to the Massachusetts State House.

 

My walking tour of downtown Boston’s Civil War monuments fosters a Place-Based Learning approach from the jump as we evaluate our first subject: the equestrian statue of General Joseph Hooker just outside the Massachusetts State House.  After we discuss the dubious military record of the Massachusetts-born, West Point-educated, and Puritan-descended Hooker, I ask the students to consider why the state legislature funded a commanding equestrian statue of Hooker at the turn of the twentieth century.[7]  With some gentle reminders that this was a period defined partly by increased immigration of the so-called “New Immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe and bouts of labor unrest in the city and state, students start to grasp that despite his lackluster credentials as a general, Hooker embodied traits and values that Boston’s Anglo-American elites believed to be threatened by immigrants and labor radicals.  That point is reinforced when we discuss what we have to do in order to view Hooker atop his steed: We look up to Hooker’s imposing figure, set against the gleaming golden dome of the Massachusetts State House.  At this and other points along the walking tour, such as the towering Soldiers and Sailors Monument that stands atop a prominent knoll on Boston Common, students see how monuments interact with urban space in order to create narratives of power.

At each monument on our walk, we engage in a similar type of evaluation of the monument’s place in the cityscape and the historical context surrounding its origins.  In downtown Boston, the Shaw/54^th Massachusetts monument, the Boston Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and a statue of Col. Thomas Cass of the Irish-American 9^th Massachusetts Regiment afford opportunities to draw connections, respectively, to Emancipationist-Unionist, Unionist-Reconciliationist, and Unionist memories of the war.   As we interpret these monuments, I push students to consider how the various strands of Civil War memory encoded in them might have been deployed by late-nineteenth century Bostonians to advance a political or social agenda amidst the national retreat from Reconstruction and local power struggles that oftentimes unfolded along racial and ethnic lines.

The author photographed in front of the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment Memorial by one of his students in April 2023.

 

We then proceed to bronzed statues of the abolitionists Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, which, when juxtaposed with the Shaw/54^th Memorial, bring to light fracture lines within the Emancipationist memory of the war.  The walking tour concludes at the site of the “Emancipation Group” monument in Park Plaza.  Replicas of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington D.C.’s Lincoln Park, the now-removed statues featured a life-sized Lincoln extending his hand over a kneeling, formerly enslaved Black man.  Since the removal of the statues in December 2020, the site includes only the monument’s pedestal bearing the inscription: “A Race Set Free/And the County at Peace/Lincoln/Rests from His Labor.”[8]  The site offers a fitting setting for us to discuss the enduring power of monuments as forms and sites of memory where claims about the past are made and contested.[9]

Caption: Following a petition campaign led by local artist Tory Bullock, the Boston Art Commission voted unanimously in 2020 to remove the Emancipation Group statues in Park Plaza.  Photo courtesy of the Boston Preservation Alliance: https://www.bostonpreservation.org/advocacy-project/emancipation-group [accessed January 7, 2025]

 

The interpretive traditions of Civil War memory evident in a walking (or, depending on distance, bus) tour of Civil War monuments in your vicinity will necessarily vary, but the Place-Based Learning pedagogy that structures this activity offers broadly applicable guidance on how to carry it out.  In order to establish that there is an academic purpose to the excursion, provide detailed instructions well in advance of the trip for what students will produce based substantially on their observations of the monuments they visit.[10]  While it will be necessary for instructors to provide context for the monuments, a participatory conversation about them should be the goal.  At each stop, prod students to make observations about what they see, where they are and what surrounds them, and what connections they can make to the history of the Civil War era they’ve learned in the class.[11]  To keep students focused, especially if they are in a bustling, loud urban environment, require them to take notes as they observe and discuss each monument and encourage them to take pictures of details that catch their eye.  Such data collection also encourages students to see themselves as participants in a dialog or debate over monuments’ meaning and function in their spaces.

Caption: At the Boston Soldiers and Sailors Monument, students make observations of one of four mezzo-relievo plaques designed by the Irish-born sculptor Martin Milmore.

 

During the last couple of weeks of classes and after the walking tour, students build on their observations of the monuments by researching in the Boston Globe’s coverage of the monuments’ planning and dedication ceremonies.  In order to keep students focused on interpretating and synthesizing the evidence, I have collected and made available to them the Globe articles.  Instructors wishing to develop students’ research abilities for this exercise could opt to require that students locate similar types of sources for monuments in their vicinity.  In my experience, students struggle enough to make out the blurred typeset of a digitized late-nineteenth century newspaper and to parse the vernacular of the period.  For earlier iterations of this assignment, I instructed students to put themselves in the shoes of a tour guide who needs to write the copy for a pamphlet to guide visitors on a walking tour of downtown Boston’s Civil War monuments.  However, these final products were typically narrative summaries of what students observed of the monuments or in the newspaper articles.  As a result, I now require students to produce an argumentative essay in which they explain how late-nineteenth century Bostonians remembered the Civil War.  In lieu of a traditional final exam for the class, we meet to share our findings and discuss why Boston’s monument landscape took shape as it did over the last third of the nineteenth century.  By this point, students have studied Reconstruction and its demise in depth and are oftentimes able to draw connections between the emergence of Unionist and Reconciliationist memories of the war in Boston and the national retreat from Reconstruction that was more or less complete by the turn of the twentieth century.

There are substantial challenges to developing and implementing a project like this.  Funding a day-long learning excursion is no easy feat for many of us at institutions where budget cuts are the order of the day.  And all told, the time spent identifying and mapping out monuments; locating and reading scholarship on their subjects; and gathering sufficient contemporaneous accounts about the monuments is substantial.  But I have found this to be one of the most rewarding projects to design, and my students’ feedback on the course consistently identifies the project (particularly the walking tour) as a part of the class they enjoyed and learned from the most.  A few years ago, a Physical Education major who took the class under the mistaken assumption that it fulfilled a General Education requirement called me over to the pedestal of the Boston Soldiers and Sailors Monument.  I had noticed him looking at his phone as I provided context about the dedication ceremony for the monument.  As it turned out, he had pulled up a compass app and determined that the woman atop the statue representing “America” was facing south.  “I wonder,” he asked, “if the sculptor did this on purpose so that she could look down to the Union soldiers who died in the South.”  Moments like this are why I continue to return to this project, for all of the challenges it poses.

 

[1] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Nora, ed., Realm of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1-20; Brown University Choices Program, “What is Historical Memory?” May 31, 2016: https://www.choices.edu/video/what-is-historical-memory/ [accessed January 6, 2025].

[2] David Blight, “In Memory’s Mirror,” The American Interest, September 1, 2011: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/09/01/in-memorys-mirror/ [accessed January 6, 2025].

[3] For this lesson, students read brief excerpts from Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009) and Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

[4] Gary W. Gallagher and Joan Waugh, The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (State College, PA: Flip Learning, 2023), 249-268.

[5] This and other challenges to putting Place-Based Learning into practice are covered thoroughly in Alan Boyle et. al., “Fieldwork is Good: The Student Perception and the Affective Domain,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 31, 2 (2007), 299-317.  Sons of Union Veterans, “National Monuments Database”: https://suvcw.org/national-monument-database [accessed January 7, 2025]; Southern Poverty Law Center, “Whose Heritage? Map”: https://www.splcenter.org/whose-heritage-map [accessed January 7, 2025].

[6] For an introduction to Place-Based Learning (otherwise referred to as Place-Based Education), see the useful overview and reading list from the University of Nebraska’s Center for Transformative Teaching: https://teaching.unl.edu/resources/introduction-place-based-learning/#:~:text=Place%2Dbased%20learning%20is%20an,learning%20through%20exploring%20their%20environment [accessed January 6, 2025].

[7] Fortunately, our textbook offers a thorough analysis of Hooker’s performance in command of the Army of the Potomac.  Gallagher and Waugh, The American War, 118-21, 131, 134.

[8] https://www.bostonpreservation.org/advocacy-project/emancipation-group [accessed January 6, 2025].

[9] Marie Fazo, “Boston Removes Statue of Formerly Enslaved Man Kneeling Before Lincoln,” New York Times, December 29, 2020.

[10] Gregory A. Smith, “Place-Based Education: Learning to Be Where We Are,” Phi Beta Kappan (April 2022), 593.

[11] S.M. Land and H.T. Zimmerman, “Facilitating Place-Based Learning in Outdoor Informal Environments with Mobile Computers,” Tech Trends 58 (January 2014), 80.