Recognizing an Imperfect Past
During the summer of 2017, the Georgia Historical Society produced and hosted Recognizing an Imperfect Past: History, Memory and the American Public, a two-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute.
NEH scholars engaged in an exploration of how we as a country recognize, remember, and memorialize controversial people and events in the American past. With some of the leading scholars of history and memory, they explored slavery and its legacy, the Confederacy, the Jim Crow era, lynching, and the Civil Rights movement and discussed how communities grapple with the memorialization of controversial figures and subjects in the public space.
The Institute has resulted in new educational resources including:
- • recorded interviews with visiting faculty relating to the topic of teaching an imperfect past
- • a K-12 teacher guide to using monuments as primary sources
- • ideas shared by NEH Summer Scholars on how their Institute experiences have shaped their own work and teachings
