Cementing Their Heroes: Historical Newspaper Coverage of Confederate Monuments
Cementing Their Heroes: Historical Newspaper Coverage of Confederate Monuments
Alexia Little (recent Grady M.A.) Accepted at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Annual Conference, August 4-7, 2021 (Online 2021). Cementing Their Heroes: Historical Newspaper Coverage of Confederate Monuments. This paper won Second Place Student Paper in the History Division Top Paper Awards.
Abstract: Following continued conflicts about Confederate monuments in American society, this study explores Civil War memory encapsulated in newspaper coverage of four Confederate monument unveilings. Discourse and narrative analyses of 258 articles published in seven U.S. newspapers in the 1890s and 1920s examine how the American public negotiated terms of heroes, victims, and villains, largely in a hegemonic Lost Cause myth that took primacy over fact, thus distorting collective memory of the war.
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