The focus of this presentation is on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s American Civil War monuments in general and the city of Pittsburgh’s monuments in particular. Drawing from my experience researching, photographing, transcribing and analyzing approximately 250 monuments across the state over the past several years, I will demonstrate that Pennsylvania’s Civil War monumentation merits consideration as a complex text and that Pittsburgh’s Civil War monumentation represents a distinct aspect of that collected text. Indeed, as a verbal and visual art form, this archive warrants collective examination from a multi-disciplinary perspective, including Memory Studies, American studies and history, and rhetorical studies. Other forms of media command public attention today, but I will argue that, symbolically and practically, these monuments continue to occupy and govern public space in ways that other forms of media cannot achieve. I will present a survey of this multifaceted collected text. The overview I offer will be juxtaposed with brief appraisals of particular, distinctive examples in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County and western Pennsylvania. I will consider the materials, setting and inscription as well as the interplay between the city’s well founded reputation for industry—iron and steel, in particular—and the city’s monumentation as a contrasting or countervailing art form. This genteel-vernacular paradox, I will contend, represents an ongoing tension that begins in mid to late nineteenth century America and continues to the present day. This presentation, therefore, will call attention to the power of terse, fragmentary verbal texts and cryptic visual imagery to reveal multi-layered meanings and implications. By focusing on selected monuments in a city of rivers and industry, I will contend that this genre provides a distinctive insight into the ways in which nineteenth century Pennsylvania confronted mortality and fate, as well as the morals, mores, ethos, ethics and politics of the age.
About the presenterTimothy S. Sedore
Timothy S. Sedore is an ordained minister and serves as Professor of English at The City University of New York, Bronx Community College, where he teaches composition, literature and religious rhetoric. His book, An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments was published in 2011 by the Southern Illinois University Press. His recent research to date includes book-length studies of Tennessee and Mississippi Civil War monuments.