Kennesaw State students created a brochure about monuments on Georgia Capitol grounds that can now be found on display and available to guests at the governor’s office.
The students created the brochure as part of their history and memory class with Dr. Jennifer Dickey, an associate professor of history and coordinator of the public history certificate program. The students conducted the research as a culmination of the class’s work throughout the semester.
Dickey said the brochure contains information about monuments for John B. Gordon, Jimmy Carter, Ellis Arnall, Richard B. Russell, Joseph E. Brown, Eugene Talmadge and Martin Luther King Jr. It also includes information about the “Expelled Because of Their Color” monument.
Multiple figures depicted in the monuments are from the Civil War era and Dickey explained that some of the research revealed was too violent or inappropriate to include in the brochure. Knowing beforehand that they wanted officials working in the Capitol building to consider offering their pamphlets to guests, the students did not want to shed too much light on the negative past in Georgia.
Katie Chauvin, one of the students responsible for the creation of the brochure, said that doing research on many of the monuments “felt like digging up dirt from people’s lives.”
Dickey explained that there was a limit of 150 words for each monument described in the pamphlet, and each description gives the important details of the person’s life that the monument is commemorating and not just their political or civic achievements.
Dickey said she was responsible for writing the overview of the history of the Capitol and the late 20th-century restoration in the brochure, but the rest of the brochure was entirely student-made.
The students involved in the making of the brochure were Katie Chauvin, Liz Christensen, Michael Heard, Paige Jennings, Jeff Kurte, Elizabeth Massucci, Tim McGaha, Brent Parmelee, Katie Proctor, Qasim Raza, Haris Roashan, Marilyn Rose, Mihram Tascioglu and Amy Young.
The brochure was later designed by Kate Daly, a communication and design specialist in the Department of Museums, Archives and Rare Books at KSU.
Several of the students that contributed to the brochure said they were excited to not only receive course credit for their work but to also have their work published and inside of the Capitol building for guests to pick up and see.
“Doing multiple research projects and historical essays don’t compare to having your name on something in the Georgia State Capitol,” Chauvin said.
