Everyday Racism and Rudeness

This chapter studies the way video serves as an indexical, albeit imperfect, discursive affordance to support complaints about everyday racism and rudeness. Smartphone video and social networks enable the production of video clips designed to shame apparently entitled or racist individuals who’ve come to be nicknamed “Karens” or “Kens” when they complain to police about barbecue grills, water stand hawking, or fellow park users who’ve asked them to leash their dog. An analysis of some of the most widely shared videos finds that in addition to their indexical affordance, such clips also present compelling phenomenological information: tone of voice, facial expression, and body language. Further, as they travel without gates through social media, such clips can be recontextualized in mistaken or even misleading ways, as with the episode involving private school student Nick Sandmann on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 2019, which highlights the limits of video’s epistemology.

Margaret French Cresson at Chesterwood

Margaret French Cresson (1889-1973) was the daughter of famed American sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), who is well-known for his Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, and his seated figure of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Cresson was also a sculptor—she studied with her father, collaborated with him on works, and later became successful in the area of portraiture. Both father and daughter were active members of the National Sculpture Society, serving in leadership positions and contributing works to exhibitions. French and his family lived in New York City and spent their summers at Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Here, French built a modern studio and a comfortable residence, and he designed lush gardens and paths through the woods. After his death, Cresson inherited the site, and she worked to preserve her father’s legacy by preserving his Studio, amassing a collection of his works, and creating a museum at Chesterwood, now a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Many of her works are in the Chesterwood collection as well. To honor Cresson’s preservation efforts and her talent as a sculptor, this season Chesterwood will exhibit some of her most successful portraits in the Studio. Next year, a full-scale exhibition of her work will be presented throughout the site.

The Black Queer/Trans Femme Representation of Beyoncé’s Media Ventriloquisms and the National Voice

This chapter historicizes the Black diva and the relationship forged between Beyoncé’s singing voice, audio technologies, and the nation. In particular, audiences might receive enhanced voice placed back upon the live performing body of a singer as a national offense until they consider the Black queer/trans femme tradition of gender (re)presentation. Fallout from Black, feminized divas across history who use audio technologies—Beyoncé’s 2013 “lip-synced” performance at President Barack Obama’s inauguration and Marian Anderson’s 1939 Lincoln Memorial outdoor concert—reveals the complexity of media ventriloquism alongside sexist, racist, transphobic, and femmephobic bias. Through debates commentators discussed the appropriateness of Beyoncé’s enhanced body as a gendered, femme icon—namely, why should the Black diva be limited to singing or appearing in a state of naturalness and not artifice? By tracing these debates, we may explore how national outrage persists surrounding the mediatized voice of Black women performers despite our current sensorium infused with media.

Don West

Born into a family of north Georgia sharecroppers, Don West became a poet, educator, activist, and organizer who celebrated, questioned, and defended the people and the land from which he came. While an undergraduate at Lincoln Memorial University, West befriended two fellow students, James Still and Jesse Stuart; all three became important writers. Stuart and West eventually parted ways because of ideological differences. Whereas Stuart romanticized the mountaineer by celebrating the agrarian ideal and avoided political engagement, West believed poetry should be politically committed and address the common person’s struggles....

Jesse Stuart

Jesse Stuart was born in northeastern Kentucky’s Greenup County. His parents, hard-working tenant farmers, instilled in him and his four siblings a drive for education, a poignant emphasis given his father’s illiteracy and his mother’s second-grade education. Stuart graduated from Lincoln Memorial University with a BA in 1929, making friends while there with Don West and James Still. At Vanderbilt University, where he attended graduate school in 1931–1932, Stuart studied with influential southern writers and critics such as Donald Davidson, who also taught Appalachian authors Mildred Haun and Jim Wayne Miller. After graduate school, Stuart returned to Greenup to work as an educator and author....

The Great War and Civil War Memory

This chapter examines the influence of Civil War commemoration on World War I commemoration and the impact of World War I on Civil War commemoration. The war limited recognition that the Lincoln Memorial climaxed development of the National Mall with less militarism than recent Lincoln statues suggested. Some sponsors of World War I monuments rejected Civil War precedents, such as those who projected useful memorials, but an army of doughboy statues built on Civil War precedents. The proliferation of male nudes was one example. The crisis of World War I caused some memorial promoters to treat the Civil War as a foreshadowing and some memorial promoters to treat the Civil War as a refuge from modernity. The Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain illustrated both tendencies and the displacement of public monuments by cinema in the 1930s.

Sacred Substantiations: Lincoln Casts and Statuary in the American Imagination

On March 31, 1860, Abraham Lincoln waited in the studio of Leonard Wells Volk as a plaster mold hardened around his face and head. After one hour, Volk removed the mold; he later repeated the process for Lincoln’s hands. The resulting life casts elicited profound emotional reactions in those who saw them. Augustus Saint-Gaudens recognized and capitalized on their invaluable status as candid indexes of Lincoln’s likeness in his 1887 Chicago monument, Abraham Lincoln: The Man. In the words of sculptor Lorado Taft, “It does not seem like a bronze. . . . One stands before it and feels himself in the very presence of America’s soul.” It was also Saint-Gaudens who amplified the casts’ influence through the manufacture of a prized series of thirty-three bronze replicas. The actual and imagined characteristics of these casts—their sense of possessing a “soul,” and their physical manifestation of Lincoln’s touch—all warrant consideration of their place within the larger tradition of holy relics. This paper posits the Lincoln casts as “contact relics” and establishes the generative potential of such a numinous categorization for American audiences, especially in the wake of the Civil War. Volk’s direct impressions of Lincoln’s visage and hands provided the “blueprints,” so to speak, for an astonishingly wide variety of sculptural manifestations—from the iconic Lincoln Memorial (1920) by Daniel Chester French to Abraham Lincoln (1917) by George Grey Barnard. This essay argues that the cultural impact of this sculptural genealogy is largely indebted to the casts’ material substantiations of Lincoln’s bodily presence and touch. Indeed, by situating these objects between medieval and modern modes of viewing, it will become clear that the casts, as progeny of the original life molds, afforded an affective, even remedial, authenticity for subsequent Lincoln monuments in the American imagination.