Owen J. Dwyer

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis | IUPUI · Department of Geography

Memorials and monuments are of increasing interest to geographers, growing out of recognition of the social nature of commemoration, and the important role that the construction, interpretation, and contestation of spaces and places play in the process and politics of remembering. Geographers envision these public symbols as part of larger cultural...

Invited contribution to Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, open access project directed by Fitzhugh Brundage and published by Carolina Digital Library and Archives. http://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/features/essays/alderman_two/

Memorials and monuments are of increasing interest to geographers, growing out of recognition of the social nature of commemoration and the important role that space and place play in the process and politics of remembering. Geographers envision these public symbols as part of larger cultural landscapes that not only reflect certain perspectives on...

Geographers have assessed the success and failure of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in terms of the African American struggle for justice, social identity, and economic survival. Conspicuously absent from the geographic literature are pedagogically oriented studies of the historical geography of the Civil Rights era. The Movement's popular image ha...

The past two decades have witnessed momentous changes on the American South's heritage landscape. First, and most dramatically, ascendant civil rights museums have established themselves as bona fide heritage attractions. Second, and more subtly, a nascent movement on the part of plantation house museums is afoot to engage with the lives and labour...

New approaches to cultural landscape have encouraged a widened range of encounters with the relationship between memory and landscape. At the same time, changing pedagogical approaches moving from an instructional to a learner-centered paradigm have emphasized hands-on, authentic assessment and inquiry-led, project-based learning. In this paper we...

Over the past two decades, geographers have probed the intersection of collective memory and urban space. Their sustained interest in the subject reflects an understanding of the social condition of commemoration and the important role that space plays in the process and politics of collective memory. Along with other critical social scientists, ge...

This article examines the responses of over 1000 tourists to an exit survey at Laura Plantation, a tourist museum site located outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. Using Critical Race Theory, we evaluate visitor interest in slavery at the plantation compared to other, more dominant narratives commonly associated with promoting plantation history thro...

Studying civil rights memorials -- where they are located, what they honor, and what they neglect -- offers insights into the evolving condition of power and racism in American society. While the events that constitute the Movement's legacy are manifestly past, the act of identifying those events and interpreting their significance take place in th...

Controversy has erupted in Selma, Alabama, over recent efforts to commemorate the career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry officer and founding member of the original Ku Klux Klan. More generally, the controversy in Selma is emblematic of an enduring regional pattern in which contests over the future are couched in terms of the past....

The past remains a passionately contested terrain in the American South. On the one hand, the memory of the Civil War is of vital importance in the region. Many white Southerners identify with romanticized images of the Confederacy (Hoelscher 2003). Alternately, a new historical vision of the region’s past has emerged, one that challenges the centr...

This chapter investigates _Alabama's Civil Rights Journey_, a piece of tourist literature produced by the state in the 1990s. Drawing comparisons between maps and monuments, I explore the tension that surrounds the inclusion and exclusion of particular representations in the state's treatment of the Civil Rights Movement. By describing the interpla...

This study examines the relative location of civil rights memorial landscapes in Atlanta, GA; Birmingham, AL; and Memphis, TN. Produced over the past two decades, these memorials are the largest and most popular of several dozen associated with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The museums and monuments under study are important sit...

Dr. Dwyer is Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46202-5140. E-mail: odwyer@iupui.edu. Ms. Gilmartin is Lecturer, Department of International Studies, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS, United Kingdom. E-mail: mary.Gilmartin@ntu.ac.uk. 1. This report...

Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape — historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums — present a distinct challenge to...

Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad are across the US South, the material elements of this landscape-historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums-present a distinct challenge to repr...

Recent work by geographers concerned with the enduring presence of racism has called for an interrogation of the privileges and contingencies of whiteness. Central to this project of denaturalizing White Identity has been the disclosure of its co-constitution with a host of social practices. Building on the work of critical theorists in the humanit...

This paper surveys research about African Americans in six geography journals between 1911 and 1995. 176 journal articles about African Americans were identified. A chronological analysis of a subset of these articles shows that it was not until the 1960s that African Americans were studied to any appreciable degree by geographers. Since that time,...