Using the Civil War and Confederate monuments, VCU author Gabriel Reich explores collective memory

By Madeline Reinsel

In 2007, Gabriel Reich visited Virginia Commonwealth University to interview for a faculty position. During a drive around Richmond, a future colleague pointed out the statues lining the renowned Monument Avenue.

"I was like, OK, cool - just being polite," said Reich, Ph.D., a professor of teaching and learning in VCU's School of Education. "And then I looked closer. I really didn't know that there were giant statues of Confederate generals still up in the United States."

In 2020, most of those statues were dismantled during nationwide protests tied to racial justice. Witnessing the removal of those monuments, as well as the backlash, provided the backdrop in which Reich completed his new book, "An Education in History and Memory: The Civil War and Historical Consciousness."

The book is the culmination of 15 years of Reich's research on how we remember and teach about the past. It spans young people's impressions of the Civil War and its causes, modern culture wars, and a framework that history teachers can use to explore historical memory in their classrooms.

Reich is co-director of the Memory Studies Lab in VCU's Humanities Research Center, where a multidisciplinary team explores group memory. But his interest in how we remember the past started well before his professional academic career.

"My whole life, I was thinking about the ways in which groups of people tell stories and help set for each other what constitutes reality," he said.

People reinforce historical memories in many ways, Reich said, and statues are one of the most obvious examples. He argues that we build monuments to teach future generations to look up to particular figures, with connections to larger stories and ideologies - but it's impossible to know how they will be viewed in the future.

"I think people generally overestimate how effective they are as teaching tools," said Reich, who added that he paid little attention to the statues erected in his native New York to honor the Union army. "Once the surprise is over, the thrill is gone, you walk past these things and don't give them much thought at all."

VCU News spoke with Reich about "An Education in History and Memory."

What are your key findings in the new book?

The central idea of the book is that everyone is perpetually working to make sense of the present by drawing on what they know about past life. Ideas about the past provide a kind of script that people compare to the present in order to understand what is happening and to imagine what might come next.

In the United States, the Civil War is a culturally significant source of information about past life that people can draw upon when trying to understand the present state of affairs and what they might lead to. That Americans do not agree on a narrative of the Civil War and what its lessons are is commonly understood. The book explores why the topic is so contested and what such contestation means for history educators.

Where does the concept of historical memory come from?

Historical memory, also called collective memory, originates in the period between the World Wars. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs articulated memory through a social lens, arguing that we do not remember by ourselves. Rather, what we remember is affected by our social groups, in which stories are repeated and edited over time.

In the case of the Civil War, quite different stories were passed down generation to generation. White Southerners were more likely to believe a story that justified the rebellion and bloody war that followed. African Americans were more likely to believe a story in which freedom from slavery was the central theme. Northerners tended to tell a largely self-congratulatory story in which their opposition to slavery prevailed and the country was reunited stronger than it was before.

How does the United States reinforce a national identity?

There are a number of technologies that exist in a culture for passing on and reinforcing a particular narrative. As in the example of the social groups above, narratives help people construct their identities. Outside of the family, a significant narrative people learn is the story of their country. That story is shared in school, through national holidays such as the Fourth of July, through popular media representations and through school curricula - my primary focus.

What role do history teachers play in shaping a national narrative?

History teachers have an important role to play. Through official curricula, they are charged with teaching the nation's past to help young people understand what it means to be American, and to be part of that national community. However, what that means is highly contested across political, geographic, social, and ethnic or racial groups.

I argue that history teachers should face that fact together with their students, and that to be more effective, history teachers should be listening closely to what their students say about the past. By identifying the collective memories their students bring with them to the classroom, teachers can more carefully design curricula that engage students in analyses of historical materials that will challenge and complicate those memories.