Thursday 12/2: Writing Respite - Civil War

UNIT 2: THE CIVIL WAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

WRITING ASSIGNMENT

DIRECTIONS: Please write a short essay in response to one of the numbered options below. When an option has multiple questions, you don’t need to answer them all – the questions are meant to kickstart your own thinking about the topic more generally! Just a few paragraphs (2-5) will be fine but give it a try

· Indicate the NUMBER of the option you are choosing at the very top of your essay.

· Email your essay as at attached document OR in the body of an email to pvdclementevets@gmail.com

· Try to have yours sent by Monday December 6^th, when Lucas joins us for writing.

1. In his 1852 July 4^th speech, Frederick Douglass argues that, at the very least, patriotism creates a moral dilemma for black Americans in his day. Private Trip, in the film “Glory,” seems to feel that same dilemma when he refuses Col. Shaw’s request to carry the regimental colors. Discuss this dilemma, drawing on Douglass’s speech and “Glory.” Feel free to reflect on whether this dilemma persists into the present, too.

2. What does Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead" say about how memorials reflect on the society they exist within (In his case, Boston) rather than simply the people they memorialize? Another way of phrasing this question might also be why does the Shaw memorial stick in the throat of Boston like a fish bone?

3. We discussed photography as a technological innovation for documenting scenes from the battlefield and presenting portraits of soldiers during the Civil War. Are claims associated with photography in this context (truth, scientific accuracy, unmediated representation) valid? Why or why not?

4. How did Lincoln’s views on slavery, race and the war change over time (and why)? Do you see any lessons we can draw from his evolution?

5. What does Lincoln argue in the Gettysburg Address? In what ways is it similar or different from what Pericles argued in his “Funeral Oration”?

6. What does Tate's poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" say about how we remember those who fought for ideas, institutions, or changes that we may not agree with or believe in? Another way of phrasing this question may be to consider the final line "the grave counts us all" and ask: how does death as a fact of our nature help us sympathize with the confederate dead?

7. What is the relationship between Lowell's poem and Tate's poem that help us understand what they may be saying to each other? Take into consideration here that Tate wrote before Lowell and inspired Lowell to write his poem.

8. Why did Reconstruction ultimately fail to foster a multiracial democracy in the post-Civil War US? What should or could have been done, to avoid that failure?

9. Considering iconography (repeated, signficant motifs), materials and scope, how are the Equal Justice Initiative memorials to lynching and slavery similar to war or veterans’ memorials? How are they different?

10. Drawing on what you’ve seen and read about the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, as well as Confederate Memorials, reflect on one of the quotes below:

Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

11. How do poems frame things in a way that photography also frames things? What can we learn by comparing these two modes in terms of what they choose to focus on, what they center, what they capture generally, and most importantly what can we learn by seeing what these frames inherently leave out?

12. In thinking about whether or not to remove the original Freedman’s Memorial from its location in Washington D.C., we can draw on a variety of tools to help us reason about and decide what the right thing to do might be. Those tools include: a capacity to interpret iconographic representation; historical facts about patronage, context, and pageantry; literary analysis of speeches and letters; and ethical analysis using Normative Ethical frameworks. For this question, write up your own assessment of what matters in this case, why it presents us with an ethical dilemma, and what you would recommend to resolve or respond to the disagreements about its future in that place.