Acknowledgments

Savage, Kirk

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Acknowledgments

Kirk Savage

Description: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century...

Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (New Edition)

I OWE MY INTEREST in public monuments to a wonderful course taught by Nicholas Penny in London in the summer of 1979. Inspired by his synthetic approach, I have been thinking about them off and on ever since. The issues at the heart of this book emerged several years later in graduate school with the help of a superb group of advisors at the University of California at Berkeley. Dell Upton steered...

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Kirk Savage

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31907

Acknowledgments

I owe my interest in public monuments to a wonderful course taught by Nicholas Penny in London in the summer of 1979. Inspired by his synthetic approach, I have been thinking about them off and on ever since. The issues at the heart of this book emerged several years later in graduate school with the help of a superb group of advisors at the University of California at Berkeley. Dell Upton steered me to Monument Avenue and gave me important criticism at every stage of my dissertation; Paula Fass made me see the importance of race; Anne Wagner made me think about Habermas and gave me a series of probing questions about the commemorative process; Margaretta Lovell guided both my thinking and my writing with great tact and acumen.

Doing justice to their comments and criticisms took me far beyond the dissertation. In that long, hard process of creating a book, many of my ideas evolved from the classes I taught. My students at the University of Pittsburgh and the College of William and Mary consistently helped and challenged me to think about the material in new ways. They are too many to name individually, but they all worked together to create an atmosphere of inquiry and constructive criticism that enabled me to take my work in more interesting directions.

Many other people and institutions have been generous and indispensable in their help. My initial research at the predoctoral stage was supported by grants from the University of California at Berkeley and by a three-year Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities. My subsequent work was supported by summer research grants from the University of Pittsburgh and by a two-year Material Culture Fellowship from the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture at the College of William and Mary. Another grant from the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund at the University of Pittsburgh helped defray the costs of reproductions. Several scholars have very kindly shared their own research materials with me: Thomas Brown, William and Aimee Cheek, Janet McCall, Merl Moore Jr., William Parrish, Louise Pettus, Henry Pisciotta, Michael Shapiro, and Chris Thomas. Others have helped out in a variety of ways both logistical and intellectual—taking a photograph, discussing a paper, doing last-minute research, offering a home away from home. These would include, to name only the most obvious, Michele Bogart, Jennifer Craven, Melissa Dabakis, Jay Fisette, George Henderson, Roberta Kefalos, Pam Kennedy, Angela Miller, Matthew Roper, Stephen Savage, Dan Sherman, Tom Somma, Wayt Thomas, Sara and William Thomas, Anne Weis, and James and Harriet Wrenn. I have also had the good fortune to work with outstanding professional staff at many research institutions. I cannot name them all, but I would like to single out a few institutions whose staff did favors above and beyond the call of duty: the Country Music Foundation Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the South Caroliniana, the Valentine Museum, and the Watertown Free Library.

I am grateful more than I can say to my editor at Princeton, Deborah Malmud, for her faith in the project and for her sensitive readings of the manuscript. I got many other careful and instructive comments from several people who read all or part of my manuscript in its later stages. These readers include Vivien Fryd, Peter Karsten, Angela Miller, and, above all, my wife Elizabeth Thomas, who has always been my first and best reader. Without her ideas, insights, and clear guidance at every stage of the project from beginning to end, this book would not be here. And without the joy that she and our three daughters Charlotte, Rose, and Sara, have given me, I would never have been able to bring the book to completion.

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