Turabian 8th edition
Book Response Expository Essay #2:
Thompson, Erin L. Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments. Boston: Norton & Norton and Company, 2023.
Write an expository essay that provides your personal responses/feelings on the central themes of the assigned book. Your essay should not simply summarize the details of the book or give a simple plot synopsis, but rather, it should provide your personal commentary on the subjects under discussion and their connection to the themes we have discussed in this class.
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Some subjects to respond to in this case may include, but are not limited to:
The role of monuments – history lessons or “pledges of allegiance” or shows of power (see p. xviii, etc.)
The purpose of removing monuments (omnipresent, but see p. 8, p. 173 for example)
Monuments as lessons in meritocracy, hierarchy, etc. (p. 17, etc.)
Monuments as tools to repress social movements, labor unions, subaltern groups, etc. (omnipresent)
Washington Monument (18)
Rescue (28-)
Horatio Greenough (Chapter 2)
Monuments and manliness; monuments and subservience (Chapter 3)
“parade rest” (46-)
Brattleboro Soldiers’ Monument (53)
Freedmen’s Memorial (56)
Robert Gould Shaw Memorial (61)
Gutzon Borglum and Stone Mountain (Chapter 4)
Mount Rushmore (Chapter 4)
The story of the sculptor as central to the significance of the monument (omnipresent)
Sheridan Monument (70)
St. Paul Columbus Monument (100)
Summer 2020 and Monument Removal (101-)
Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (122)
Hannah Duston Memorial (146)
The Spirit of the Confederacy (151)
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Your essay must be between 4-5 pages of analysis that cannot include a title page or a bibliography – both of which are acceptable but not required. Your essay should be a proper expository essay, meaning, it should have a clear expression of its subject, a statement of its thesis, and a short section on the author’s methodology. Your essay must reference the book and other in-class sources (if possible) frequently, and it must properly cite its sources with footnotes that employ the Chicago-Turabian style.