Savage, Kirk : University of Pittsburg, Pittsburg Campus
Kirk Savage is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.
He has lectured and published widely on American public monuments.
Review
"In a richly detailed and engagingly written study, art historian Kirk Savage traces the development of
... monuments in the context of the nation's stilluncompleted attempt to deal with the issues of race and collective
memory."
--The Boston Globe
"Savage's book ... underscores the importance of reading diverse textsincluding mute monuments from the past.
Racism, chiseled into our country's foundation, continues to confuse our commemorative rituals and, alas, our historical
memory."
--Raleigh (NC) News and Observer
"In a challenging addition to recent work on the place of the Civil War in American memory, Kirk Savage shows
ingenuity in his analysis and interpretation of postwar commemorative sculpture."
--The Times Literary Supplement
"Savage's astute observations reveal not only the theoretical foundation of racism embedded in sculpture but
the importance of the aesthetic dimension of racial history. . . . A tour de force. . . ."
--Library Journal
"Well researched and elegantly written, this work is a powerful statement about the relationship of the Civil
War and race to monuments and public space."
--Florida Historical Quarterly
"Kirk Savage joins the growing literature on the politics of public memory and commemoration with the rich
scholarship on race and nationhood. His book is a finely conceptualized, beautifully argued study of the challenges
of representing the new postwar relationship of black to white."
--Angela Miller, Washington University
"In my town there are equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (Nat Turner has not yet found
his monument, to say nothing of Sojourner Truth). In nearby Richmond, a twentyfourfoot statue of Arthur Ashe is
dwarfed by sixtyfoot statues of Lee and other Confederate heroes. Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves
eloquently and authoritatively exposes the way racial dominance has been literally built into the public space
that surrounds usspace in which it is, for this reason, increasingly difficult to live."
Eric Lott, University of Virginia, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
"In a fascinating study of public space and the lessthanpublic contradictions of nineteenthcentury culture,
Kirk Savage sheds light not only on memory and monument, but also on the invention of the `popular' itself."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"A finely conceptualized, beautifully argued study of the challenges of representing the new postwar relationship
of black to white."
--Angela Miller, Washington University
Submitted by the Publisher, March, 2002
Summary
The United States of America originated as a slave society, holding millions of Africans and their descendants
in bondage, and remained so until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once slaves themselves.
Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves explores how that history of slavery and its violent end was told in public
space--specifically in the sculptural monuments that increasingly came to dominate streets, parks, and town squares
in nineteenth-century America. Here Kirk Savage shows how the greatest era of monument building in American history
arose amidst struggles over race, gender, and collective memory. As men and women North and South fought to define
the war's legacy in monumental art, they reshaped the cultural landscape of American nationalism. At the same time
that the Civil War challenged the nation to reexamine the meaning of freedom, Americans began to erect public monuments
as never before. Savage studies this extraordinary moment in American history when a new interracial order seemed
to be on the horizon, and when public sculptors tried to bring that new order into concrete form. Looking at monuments
built and unbuilt, Savage shows how an old image of black slavery was perpetuated while a new image of the common
white soldier was launched in public space. Faced with the challenge of Reconstruction, the nation ultimately recast
itself in the mold of the ordinary white man. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, the first sustained investigation
of monument building as a process of national and racial definition, probes a host of fascinating questions: How
was slavery to be explained without exploding the myth of a "united" people? How did notions of heroism
become racialized? And more generally, who is represented in and by monumental space? How are particular visions
of history constructed by public monuments? Written in an engaging fashion, this book will appeal to a wide range
of readers interested in American culture, race relations, and public art.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Ch. 1 Introduction
Ch. 2 Exposing Slavery
Ch. 3 Imagining Emancipation
Ch. 4 Freedom's Memorial
Ch. 5 Slavery's Memorial
Ch. 6 Common Soldiers
Ch. 7 Epilogue
