Interpreting Memory With Caution: Pressed Histories and Pressed Flowers

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This week, our group was provided with an extremely special artifact, a personal botany book from 1871. The book was created and filled out by George F. Southard and was later passed down to his brother Henry, in the early 1900's. Inside, the book has a drawing of Oliver Goldsmith, an Irish writer, on the opening page. We are not sure why this image is present in the book, but we believe it serves as some sort of inspiration for the journal as Goldsmith wrote about nature in some of his works. There is also a multi-paged index at the beginning book. This is followed by many pages of pressed, dried flowers and plants, with their scientific names inscribed next to each one, along with other notes the author might have. We are not sure if this book was created for academic purposes or simply just for enjoyment, but it was very interesting to read and examine nonetheless. 

This week in class, we focused mainly on chapters from "The Struggle for the People's King" by Hajar Yazdiha. I found Chapter 3 particularly interesting. In this chapter, Yazdiha discusses how the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement, specifically Dr. King, was twisted and utilized as a means of giving justification to the arguments of certain groups. This tactic was used by both the leaders of the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the Family Values Movement, in order to combat the opposition's claims and beliefs. For example, the LGBTQ+ movement used images, such as segregated water fountains, to emphasize the injustice of the discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, while the Family Values Movement and the Take Back Miami-Dade Campaign referenced Dr. King's religious views as reasoning for how he would be "obviously" opposed to gay rights. It was very interesting to see how any historical figure, event, or artifact can be misconstrued in order to support beliefs that it might not have even been associated with.

During our examination of the book, my group and I were very eager to add it to our curation, as it added some variation in the time periods of our other sources, and was overall just a very interesting and impressive artifact. One challenge we had was figuring out a way to correctly include it in the narrative and theme of our curation, which is centered on environmentalism and activism. The book was only about botany, not any sort of environmental activism. So, we reasoned that all the collected plants represented a very early example of environmental awareness, which we could appropriately fit in to our curation. However, this made me think about the Yazdiha chapter and how the two groups, who I mentioned previously, twisted history to support their own endeavors. I wondered, was my group doing the same thing with this book, changing it's narrative so we would be able to effectively use it? I believe it is important to honor history, but not weaponize, which I've realized is very important to remember, especially while we go through the process of choosing historical artifacts for this curation project.  




Cited Works

1. Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.




 

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