Stanford Humanities Center
Emily Greenfield is a PhD candidate in U.S. History, studying slavery in American memory. My research explores constructions of the past in public space—the remembering and forgetting that unfolds in textbooks and museums, on tour at historic sites, and across the built landscape of America’s memorials and monuments. Before entering the PhD program she was a producer at CBS News, where my work drew heavily on the network’s film archives, and a member of the leadership team of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
SHC Project
“Carry Me Back to Old Virginia”: Slavery, Memory, and the Making of a National Shrine
In 1923, a group of Manhattan lawyers purchased Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, and opened the site to the public as a “patriotic shrine.” The acquisition launched a memorial movement: at the peak of Jim Crow, backed by northern funds, presidential sites in Central Virginia beckoned tourists to “breathe the Spirit of the Fathers,” and “know America!” Millions heeded the call to pilgrimage. Greenfield's dissertation presents the archetype of the postslavery plantation—the house on the U.S. nickel—as a quintessential place to understand processes of national memory, and particularly the ways in which slavery was remembered and forgotten across a long twentieth century. This is the first book-length archival study of Monticello’s public history, and the first to approach the site through the methodologies of collective memory.
