Below are samples and summaries of primary and secondary sources from which this project will draw.
Primary
Often the first source for historians looking to get a handle on Confederate memorial culture, Confederate Veteran provides important background for this project. In addition to publishing calls for fundraising and soldiers’ memoirs, the popular periodical reported enthusiastically about commemorative successes like that of the second monument to Colonel William P. Rogers of the 2nd Texas Infantry at his gravesite in Corinth.
Postcards can provide evidence of the built environment of Corinth and its relationship to Civil War commemoration within the town. The first Rogers monument – that to Rogers and other Confederate soldiers who fell at the October 4, 1862 Battle of Corinth – once occupied the intersection of Franklin and Waldron Streets in downtown Corinth. This was moved to the courthouse lawn in 1918, but Corinth was one of only a small handful of Mississippi towns who placed their Confederate memorials outside of cemetery or government property. That they did so is indicative of the clear political message monument supporters intended.
Various records relate the history of Black struggles for freedom, education, and bodily autonomy in post-Civil War Corinth. These political efforts by the newly-freedpeople and the federal government provide crucial political context to the first memorial and commemorative activities of the competing interpretive traditions taking root in Corinth in the war’s aftermath, both of which were always connected to contemporary political events.
Manuscript collections often hold interesting photos of Confederate memorial culture and its relationship to educating youth in town:
The monthly newsletter of the Mississippi Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy holds valuable and revealing details about the inner workings of this Confederate memorial organization and its commitment to white supremacy:
Secondary
Three foundational secondary sources for this project are Karen Cox’s Dixie’s Daughters (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), Stephen Cresswell’s Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), and Timothy B. Smith’s Altogether Fitting and Proper (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015). Cox’s book is the preeminent account of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and explores the gendered dimensions of a Confederate commemorative culture based upon white supremacy and a perversion of the past for political – and psychological – purposes (otherwise known as the Lost Cause). Cresswell’s study chronicles the state’s machinations to institute apartheid Jim Crow rule, beginning with “redemption” in the mid-1870s, gaining strength from an 1890 state constitution that effectively disfranchised Black Mississippians, and the beginning of the all-white primary in 1903. Like Cresswell’s work, Smith’s overview of Civil War battlefield preservation provides critical context for how Corinth’s preservation and commemorative activities fit within the broader cultural and political movement of preserving place as sites of cultural memory and representations of (often competing) political priorities. Many other works form the secondary source foundation of this project, which by necessity blends Civil War and Reconstruction history with the broader works on southern politics, race, gender, and memory from 1866 to the present.
This project will be sensitive to the politically and racially charged nature of its subject, and will properly contextualize historic documents, symbols, and dated interpretations and racial and gender attitudes in the primary sources it presents. It takes serious the notion articulated by Leslie Madsen-Brooks that good digital history often takes the role not of “’sage on the stage’” but “’guide on the side.’” (1) This guiding role is especially important in light of the ongoing controversy with Confederate monuments, which has been particularly acute since 2015. This site wants to engage with the contending commemorative traditions alive in Corinth, and uses these documents as a way to communicate how these traditions are today jockeying for supremacy in town. The site seeks to honestly confront a white supremacist Confederate commemorative tradition that is very much alive in Corinth today.
- Dougherty, Jack. Writing History In the Digital Age. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.12230987.0001.001. EPUB. Quote p. 61.