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Book Talk, Akela Reason, Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York. Yale University Press, 2025.

"Using a wealth of archival sources, the book examines the stories behind New York City's Civil War soldiers' monuments. Although historians have suggested that Union commemoration was largely uncontested, New York's monuments reveal a much more fractious story. My book argues, through a careful exploration of the machinations of multiple stakeholders, that New York's Union soldiers’ monuments were shaped by Gilded Age New York's notoriously bruising municipal politics. Indeed, politicians viewed these works as high-profile public works projects, and, as such, many of these monuments were riddled with corruption, fraud, and spoils system patronage. Nonetheless, the political interests that built these monuments exhibited remarkably little interest in artistic concerns and often left design decisions to the artists who created them. The book traces the political and aesthetic conflicts that shaped the city's Civil War monuments, as well as notable opportunities, some realized and some not, to address the contributions of African American servicemen in public sculpture."

A link to the Zoom talk will be forwarded 24 hours prior to the talk.

Co-sponsored by interdisciplinary studies, humanities brigade, history and art + design