National University NEH Dialogues of War Project: Veterans Speak 2025

Schedule
There will be two discussion groups, capped at a maximum of twenty-five participants each. Groups will have three discussion leaders. This structure supports facilitated whole-group discussions and breakout sessions where members talk in-depth, ask questions, and explore humanities themes in a smaller, more dynamic setting. Groups will meet ten times (twice monthly for five months) for 2 to 2.5 hours each time. A weekday evening and a weekend daytime group will accommodate different schedules and allow greater participation. Discussion groups will meet virtually to allow for wider participation. A Directed Reading Course on “Legacies of War” will also be offered.

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Session 1: What is Memory?
Themes:
Memory Landscapes, Personal Memories, Selective Memory, and Willful Forgetting

Readings:

• Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 5-19.
• David Glassberg, “Public History and the Study of Memory,” The Public Historian 18, no. 2 (1996): 7–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377910.
• Noa Gedi, and Yigal Elam. “Collective Memory — What Is It?” History and Memory 8, no. 1 (1996): 30–50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25618696.

Questions:
What is the relationship between history and memory? How do monuments, memorials, and important historic sites frame collective memory? Do we imprint on monuments what we wish them to be? Do societies collectively remember and willfully forget? Who owns memory?

Session 2: Memory Landscapes of the Civil War
Themes:
Memory Landscapes
Readings:

• Timothy B. Smith, The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America's First Five Military Parks (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 51-85.
• Dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896), 80-83.

Questions:
How were the National Battlefield Parks preserved with monuments to support the reconciliation process? Why might the creation of memory landscapes help veterans process their own experiences? Can a national park facilitate healing and nation-building between opposing sides in a war?

Session 3: Confederate Monuments
Themes:
Personal Memories, Selective Memory/Willful Forgetting
Readings:

• Julian Carr, Speech at the Dedication of Silent Sam, (1913).
• Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 13-45.

Questions:
How did Julius Carr explain the dedication of the Silent Sam Monument? Does his speech indicate a selective remembering as well as willful forgetting of the past? Does Domby’s work enhance our understanding?

Session 4: Women and Confederate Memories
Themes:
Personal Memories, Selective Memory/Willful Forgetting
Readings:

• Karen L. Cox, Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2019), 28-72, 93-117.
• Edward H. Sebesta and James W. Loewen, eds., The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The Great Truth about the Lost Cause (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2010), Rutherford: 238-239; Lowry 257-262.

Questions:
What role did women and men play in the making of the Lost Cause mythology and the remembrance of the American Civil War? Do they illustrate a selective remembering of the past? Why or why not?

Session 5: Trauma of War in the Civil War West
Themes:
Personal Memories, Selective Memory/Willful Forgetting, Trauma and Memory
Readings:

• Kevin Waite. Op-Ed: California finally sweeps away most of its tributes to the Confederacy. What took so long, The Los Angeles Times, Opinion Section, Sept. 20, 2020.
• John R. Legg, Counterpoint: Remember the trauma of the Dakota in recalling the 1862 war, The Minnesota Star Tribune, Commentaries, December 5, 2018.

Questions:
How might personal memories in contested regions impact selective remembrance? Why might trauma over generations shape Native American views on the Civil War era?

Session 6: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC.
Themes:
Trauma and Memory: Communal and Personal
Readings:

• Louis Menand, Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The History Reader (2002).
• Maya Lin, Making the Memorial, The New York Review of Books, November 2, 2000.

Questions:
Does a war belong only to the ones who fought in it? Did the Vietnam Veterans Memorial achieve universality without becoming weakly neutral?

Session 7: Personal Journey
Themes:
Personal Memory, Trauma and Memory, Remembering and Forgetting
Readings:

• Susan R. Dixon and Mark M. Smith, Seeking Quan Am: A Dual Memoir of War and Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: ATI Books 2019), 194-311.
• Al Moore, Warpath: One Vietnam Veteran's Journey through War, Disillusionment, Guilt and Recovery (Virginia Beach: Apache Press Books, 2022), 223–276.
• Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, 279-300.

Questions:
Can personal memories change and still be accurate and truthful? What is a healthy balance between remembering and forgetting?

Session 8: Returns and Re-encounters
Themes:
Trauma and Memory, Memory Landscapes
Readings:

• Marc Steiner & Center for Emerging Media, Shared Weight (podcast), Wandering Souls, December 17, 2012.
• Quan Barry, She Weeps Each Time You Are Born (New York: Pantheon, 2015).
• Tom Gery, “Gold Star Mothers,” in Lost & Found, ed. Randall Jones (Winston-Salem: Randall Jones Publishing, 2023).

Questions:
What responsibility do the living owe to the dead? To each other? Does the past own the story? Does history? In what ways do the lives of the living and the dead intermingle?

Session 9: The Storytellers
Themes:
Memory Landscapes, Personal Memories, Trauma and Memory
Readings:

• Thi Buy, The Best We Could Do (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2017).
• Patrick Lawrence and Christian Appy, “Making history safe again: What Ken Burns gets wrong about Vietnam,” Salon, October 15, 2017.

Questions:
What happens to collective identity after a shared experience of trauma? At what point do omissions constitute willful forgetting? Can stories of individuals or families provide a corrective to stories of strategy and battles?

Session 10: Who Owns Memory?
Themes:
Memory Landscapes, Personal Memories, Selective Memory/Willful Forgetting, Trauma and Memory
Event:
Docent-Conducted Virtual Tour: Andersonville National Historic Site and the National Prisoner of War Museum
Readings:

• Phil Klay, “After War, a Failure of the Imagination,” The New York Times, February 14, 2014.
• New Orleans' Confederate statue removal, Times-Picayune, August 13, 2015.

Questions:
Do people over generations experience trauma the same way? How do our selective memories and willful forgetting shape memory landscapes and people’s lives? Who owns memory? Can a national park facilitate healing and nation-building between opposing sides in a war?