The Transformative Capacity of Commemorating Violent Pasts: Exploring Local Commemoration of the ìMississippi Burningî Murders.

Philadelphia, Mississippi—the city notorious for the violence, denial, and collective obstruction of justice surrounding the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers—is now hailed as a beacon of racial reconciliation. How and why this unexpected transformation took place is the question motivating this dissertation. My central hypothesis is that the public commemoration in Philadelphia in 2004 holds the key to understanding this phenomenon. To explore this hypothesis, I identify three racially significant institutional outcomes of the 2004 commemorations in Philadelphia—the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a statewide truth commission, and a bill mandating civil rights education—and evaluate whether and how these outcomes can be causally attributed to the 2004 commemoration. Drawing on archival, interview, and observational data, I employ event structure analysis to reconstruct the causal pathways leading to each outcome. After finding sufficient evidence to suggest that each transformation can be causally related to the 2004 commemoration, I then compare the 2004 commemoration to a similar commemoration that took place in Philadelphia in 1989. Through this comparison, I examine which factors present in 2004, but not in 1989, that enabled the 2004 commemoration to facilitate these transformative outcomes. This dissertation suggests that the 2004 commemoration helped catalyze the Killen trial, truth commission, and education bill by mobilizing a new generation of mnemonic entrepreneurs, strengthening the community’s mnemonic capacity, shifting local and state-level opportunity structures, and transforming the local political culture. This study also suggests that the way a commemoration is put together matters for it’s outcomes. Compared to the 1989 commemoration, the 2004 commemoration more deeply engaged Philadelphia’s African American counterpublic and created a more inclusive planning process that enabled organizers to develop social solidarity, and later, a distinct organizational identity and infrastructure. This study thus engages larger questions of theoretical concern regarding how commemorations of violent pasts actually work and whether they can transform the often contested and tragic conditions from which they emerge. Furthermore, this study provides a unique lens through which to explore the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and continuing efforts for racial justice.PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113346/1/cwhitlin_1.pd

Design and Designers of Nigerian Postage Stamp

Conceptually, codified signs and symbols are the two most apparent forerunners of postage stamp, divergently displayed by some of the world’s foremost civilizations. Many of whom are contributors to the world artistic tradition; among them are Egypt, Persia, Greek, Rome, Ifè and Old Òyó of Southwestern Nigeria. Necessity however, led the British government to officially launched postage stamp; a small piece of paper with adhesive cum design surface in the year 1840; a development that brought among other thing standard in generation and distribution of mails globally. An experience Lagos, Nigeria has been enjoying since 1874 being a colony of Britain. 1914 however, was significant in the history of Nigeria because her amalgamation was commemorated with an official postage stamp. It is however regrettable that after a century of indigenous operation, she is yet to meet global practices where practitioners are recognized among others. This paper examines the emergence, designs, productions, themes and designers of postage stamp in Nigeria. Keywords: philatelic, post office, postage stamp, postage stamp design, postage stamp designer

The Public Image of the Universal Postal Union in the Anglophone World, 1874-1949

This essay contends that the obscurity of the Postal Union was, to a significant degree, intentional. Postal Union administrators understood that their operational success rested in large part on their ability to convince the public that, unlike generals and diplomats, they were dispassionate experts who lacked a political agenda. Had contemporaries come to regard their deliberations as partisan, rather than as neutral and objective, they risked embroilment in Great Power politics. And should this happen, they would lose the autonomy that they had attained as technical professional

Social Content of the International Sphere: Symbols and Meaning in Franco-German Relations. CES Germany & Europe Working Paper no. 02.2, 2002

With respect to the particular empirical domain and historical period that this paper examines, a conceptual focus on symbols makes it possible to construct a narrative that brings together a host of symbolic Franco-German practices between the late 1950s and the end of the century. As isolated events all of these episodes and pieces are well documented. However, only the conceptual tool that this article develops provides the means to assemble these manifold incidents and occurrences into a coherent whole, to comprehend their connectedness, and to appreciate the social meaning with its characteristic effects that these symbolic acts generate and perpetuate in their entirety. In sum, in this paper I pursue three goals. First, I distinguish the concept of “predominantly symbolic acts and practices among states” and define symbolic acts as a distinct category of international practice. I provide the conceptual framework to capture important international social content as well as to appreciate the effects of such meaning and social purpose. Second, with this conceptual addition, I systematically explore the empirical manifestation of such acts, and the meaning and purpose they help to institutionalize, for the bilateral relationship between France and Germany between the late 1950s and mid-1990s. I specify their substance and review their meaning. Third, I propose to view symbolic practices and their effects as elements of international social structure of interaction and meaning, and, as such, to consider them and the meaning they embody as ontological building blocks of international life. Doing so, in this paper I connect symbols to a social-structural style of international analysis. Both conceptually and empirically, this article attempts to fill a gap in the literature. It is as much about the “special” Franco-German relationship as it is about important ontological issues in international relations theory

The double-life of the Scottish past: discourses of commemoration in nineteenth-century Scotland

This thesis proposes that the Scottish past lived a double-life, both as history and as memory. This is archived through an analysis of the discourse of commemoration in Scotland, focusing on the commemorative representation of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, John Knox and the Scottish Reformation, as well as the seventeenth-century Covenanters. In common with other nations in Europe and further afield, Scottish civil society was adept at commemorating its past as a means of proving its national legitimacy in the present. Analysis of these practices shows that, far from the Scottish past being elided from discourses of Scottish national identity in the nineteenth century, collective memories of Wallace, Bruce, Knox and the Covenanters were invoked and deployed in order to assert Scotland’s historic independence and ‘nationality.’ Furthermore, whereas until recently, the tension between Scottishness and Britishness was seen as having undermined attempts to express a coherent and viable Scottish nationality at this time, collective memories of the legacies of Scotland’s national heroes were used to assert Scotland’s role as an equal, partner nation in the enterprise of Great Britain and the British Empire. At the core of this national memory was the concept of ‘civil and religious liberty,’ whereby the Scottish past was defined by the struggle for and achievement of civil and religious deliverance from the hands of tyranny. As each period had its own set of heroes whose efforts had returned Scotland to its true path of civil and religious liberty, so each hero had faced his or her own despot intent on undermining Scottish nationality: for Wallace and Bruce it had been the Plantagenet monarchy, for Knox and his fellow Reformers it was the Roman Catholic Church, and for the Covenanters it was the later Stuart kings. These victories were woven, implicitly and explicitly, into an unbroken narrative of civil and religious liberty, sustaining Scotland’s historic nationality

Focal Spot, Commemorative Issue, 1996

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/focal_spot_archives/1074/thumbnail.jp