Monuments to Absence

View Inside

304 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 14 halftones, notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-3083-0
Published: February 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-3082-3
Published: February 2017
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-3084-7
Published: February 2017
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-4703-4
Published: February 2017

Buy this Book

Paperback $32.50
Hardcover $99.00
E-Book $19.99

Apple iBookstore Barnes and Noble Ebooks Amazon Kindle

For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies

To purchase online via an independent bookstore, visit Bookshop.org

Author Website

Follow the Author on Twitter

Awards & distinctions

2018 Malcolm Bell, Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award, Georgia Historical Society

The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.

About the Author

Andrew Denson teaches history at Western Carolina University.
For more information about Andrew Denson, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

“Bridges studies of memory and southern culture. . . . This lively book deserves a place in college libraries. Highly recommended.”—Choice

“Denson’s work is thoroughly researched and merges elements of public, cultural, political, and Native histories to produce an impressively cogent and cohesive whole.”—H-Net Reviews

“Highlights the contrasting, competing, and changing stories of removal that non-Indians and Cherokees have told in different places and times.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“A significant and timely contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the Native South.”—The Journal of Southern History

“An engaging examination of the politics of place-making in the twentieth century that contributes to studies of public history, the South, Native peoples, and memory.”—Chronicles of Oklahoma

“Groundbreaking . . . effectively presents how Native people crafted narratives alongside white narratives.”—West Virginia History