Top Ten Posts of 2018: #5-2

It is the end of another year and we are counting down the top ten posts of 2018!

#5: Material Culture and the Confederate Monument Debate

Becca Capiobianco’s piece about Confederate monuments, the work that monuments are intended to do, and how this complex history is relevant to the conversations going on in our current world. This piece asks us to think critically about monuments and other aspects of memory in society.

#4: The 14th Amendment to Black New Orleans

"The 14th Amendment was a part of Reconstruction history, but its effects and interpretations are still being debated. It was meant to engage the four million formerly enslaved people with its prevailing morality – the language of equal justice after the Civil War. This was quite meaningful to the people of New Orleans who brought some of the first suits in the nation to uphold the rights of African descendants."

In this guest post, Fatima Shaik looks at the meaning of the 14th Amendment for New Orleans and how it was used to support and then restrict the rights of the city's residents.

#3: Historic Site Review: Frogmore Cotton Plantation, Natchez, MS

In this post, Katie Thompson offers a review of Frogmore Cotton Planation in Natchez, MS, and its interpretation of slavery and cotton production.

#2: Mississippi Finally “Bans” Slavery

In February 2013 headlines announced that the state of Mississippi had finally banned slavery.  Now this is not to say that the state had been stuck in an Antebellum/Civil War timewarp for the past century and a half.  But apparently there were a few oversights along the way.