Reconciliation Park, Mankato, Minn.
Greg Kaster, Department of History and Hanson-Peterson Chair of Liberal Studies, participated in two sessions of the 53rd Annual Northern Great Plains History Conference in Mankato, MN, September 20-22, 2018. He chaired a session on “Monuments and Memory” and was commentator for a session on “Civil War and Reconstruction.” The former panel focused on issues surrounding the public commemoration and memory in monuments to controversial historical figures and events (Columbus, Confederate military and political leaders, and the U.S. –Dakota War of 1862), while the latter panel focused on a key text in the postwar Southern canonization of Robert E. Lee and the role of religion in impeding reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites in the decades after the Civil War.
Robert E. Lee