Publication Date

12-2023

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Dorothea Browder, Alexander Olson, Kathryn McClurkin

Degree Program

Department of History

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

Situated near the original location of the birthplace and childhood home of Jefferson Davis, the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Fairview, Kentucky, houses a 351-foot tall obelisk, completed in 1924, along with a modest museum, gift shop, playground, and picnic area. At the site’s museum, visitors receive an innocuous and seemingly uncontroversial lesson about Davis, the statesman, since most of the interpretive panels focus on Davis’s role as a public servant before becoming the only president of the Confederate States of America. Thus, the museum misses a critical opportunity to engage visitors in a dialogue about the monument’s meaning for the present.

Instead of providing a critical analysis of what Confederate Veterans and their kin, including members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, intended the monument to represent about Davis, the museum perpetuates their goal to utilize the obelisk as evidence of the “lost cause.” Further, the site remains silent on Davis’s personal experience with slavery, his explicit endorsement of human bondage, and the Black people who resided with the Davis family in Fairview. By perpetuating the invisibility of the enslaved individuals who labored for the Davis family and remaining silent about the racist ideologies that shaped Davis’s and the monument creators’ political ideologies, the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site perpetuates the white supremacist ideologies that Confederate veterans and their kin hoped that memorials like the Jefferson Davis Monument would perpetuate indefinitely.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | History | Public History | Social History | United States History

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