On Contentious Ground

“On Contentious Ground” is a documentary series that focuses on visitors to American Civil War sites and landscapes. The American Civil War remains a polarizing and formative event in American history and memory, one that still clearly marks a divisive fissure in America. Every year, millions of Americans visit the sites where thousands of Americans fell fighting to either uphold white supremacy or to break the chains and give birth to a new freedom - one more closely aligned with the universality proposed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution: where all men are created equally. By picturing visitors in these spaces, how they appear and reflect on the memories of slavery’s legacy and the cost of freedom for everyone in our nation, I aim to capture the reverberations of the Civil War rippling into our time, as if to picture the long shadow the Civil War has cast onto today.