Locating Slavery's Legacies For generations after the Civil War, colleges across the eastern United States opened their campuses to memorials that honored the complicated and diverse legacies of American slavery.
The Locating Slavery's Legacies database locates and documents these enduring remnants of slavery’s history, yielding insight into their place in American higher education.
Introducing the Database Project
The Locating Slavery’s Legacies database (LSLdb) contains information about monuments and memorials linked to the legacies of slavery on American college campuses.
The LSLdb is produced by research teams of instructors and students on campuses across the region. As it grows, this public resource will shed light on the interplay of movements associated with Civil War memory and the expansion of higher education in the 160 years after emancipation.
The database includes memorials erected to promote the Lost Cause, but it also contains those in support of racial equality and universal Civil Rights. Institutions with deep or recent histories of recognizing African Americans' long struggle for Civil Rights can contribute their campus structures, thereby complicating and diversifying the record of memorialization from the end of the Civil War to today.
How to Use the Database
Click here to learn more about how the database works and how to use its support resources.
Meet Our Database Partners
Click here to learn more about the college and university contributors to our project.
Explore the Resources
Click here to learn more about how to use the database in your teaching and research.
Keep Up On Our Pinpoint Blog
Click here to get firsthand accounts and insights from the contributors to the database.
From the Database: A stained-glass memorial to the Lost Cause
The banner image on our home page is of a memorial created by the renowned glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1925 and commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy for placement on The University of Alabama campus. The Christian knight depicted was to memorialize the University's student cadets who served in the Confederate Army. Since its installation in 1925, the window has been moved twice by the university and today resides in the special collections library. Click on the link below to learn more about this Confederate memorial and others at the University of Alabama.
