Illinois and the Memory of the Civil War

Monuments decorate the court houses and town squares of many Illinois towns, like Galena, Princeton, Freeport, Ottawa, Morris, Jacksonville, and Joliet. While this adds to our knowledge and understanding of the larger issues, it effectually abandons the public at large and the interest in the more traditional topics. [...]the general public who hungers for this knowledge are forced to look elsewhere for it. [...]there is the public at large, those who are interested in the history but not intensely enough to pursue it as aggressively as those who belong to the other groups. There is no widespread governmental support and the news media is all but ignoring the anniversary. [...]all efforts to commemorate this era of our history will exist at the grass roots level like the current effort to create an historic site on the grounds of Camp Douglas on Chicago's South Side.