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Interviewees
Edwards, Ana
Accessibility Note
Content is digitally accessible 2024.
Interviewer
Bowden, Eric
Description
Ana Edwards is a public historian and assistant professor in VCU’s Deptartment of African American Studies. As founding chair of the Defenders’ Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project (2004), and in collaboration with other community organizations, she contributed to the popularization of Gabriel’s Rebellion, reclamation of Richmond's first municipal African Burial Ground and helped lead the community campaign to establish a Memorial Park in Shockoe Bottom–a 10-acre area that was central to the city’s role as the epicenter of the US domestic slave trade.
Edwards speaks about her childhood in Los Angeles, California, growing up with a Black father and white mother, her academic family, her Norwegian heritage, the Virginia town of Norge, what Richmond was like when Edwards first moved there in 1988, the landscape of art at VCU in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the recovery of the African Burial Ground using public strategic planning documents from VCU, the history of monument making following the United States Civil War in Richmond and post-2020 changes to the monument landscape, the in-progress Shockoe Memorial Park, who gets to tell history, the role of white women in preserving the idea of the Lost Cause of the Civil War, the way the James River manifests in the story of Gabriel’s Rebellion, the Richmond Slave Trail Commission, how people are interested in learning the true history of the places they visit and inhabit, VCU’s racial literacy curriculum, the river’s psychological effects, themes of water in art, Edwards’s first time in the James River, the overlap between public history and environmental history, the role of sentimentality in environmental conservation, survival in an uncertain world, and restoring natural habitats.
Personal Name Subject
Prosser, Gabriel, approximately 1775-1800
Corporate Name Subject
United Daughters of the Confederacy
Topical Subject
James River (Va.); Outdoor recreation; Outdoor recreation for children; Outdoor recreation--Environmental aspects; Trails; Environmentalism; Parks; Parks--Maintenance; Education parks; Conservation; United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Monuments; Lost Cause mythology; Slave rebellions--Virginia; Public history--United States
City/Location
Richmond (Va.)
Genre
oral histories (literary genre)
Local Genre
oral history; sound recording; text
Type
Sound; Text
Digital Format
audio/mp3
Language
eng
Rights Statement URL
Rights
This material is protected by copyright, and copyright is held by Ana Edwards. You are permitted to use this material in any way that is permitted by copyright. In addition, this material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Acknowledgment of Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries as a source is required.
Collection
James River Park System Oral History Project
Contributors
James River Park System
Source
Ana Edwards interview (2024-04-19), James River Park System Oral Histories, M 569, Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Commonwealth University.
File Name
jrpsoh_edwardsana_interview.mp3
Disciplines
Environmental Education | Public History | Social History | United States History