KSU Student Wins Georgia Archives Award

KENNESAW, Ga. (Oct 19, 2012) — Angela Tooley, a 2012 graduate (history major) of KSU, is the winner of the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board’s annual award for the best undergraduate historical essay. The announcement was made at the Georgia Archives on Monday, October 16. Tooley’s winning paper was her senior thesis at KSU: “Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, the Lost Cause, and African Americans in the Atlanta Campaign: An Analysis of Historical Interpretation, 1935–2012.”

In her thesis, Tooley showed how, through most of its history, the Park’s past was described in terms of the Lost Cause: the Civil War was a conflict over states’ rights. More recently, the war has become a necessary prelude to the civil rights movement. African Americans were completely absent from the first narrative, and hence from the centennial observance of the Civil War in the 1960s; with the changed perspective of the second narrative, African Americans are center stage for the war’s sesquicentennial.

Tooley’s thesis--the first scholarly work to examine Kennesaw Mountain (or any other of the Atlanta Campaign sites) from this perspective--has been accepted for publication and will appear this month in the Georgia Historical Quarterly.