“Spectres of Liberty” and the Archive

This epilogue considers the legacy of nineteenth-century sentimentalism, turning to contemporary civic statuary that memorializes nineteenth-century sentimentalists. Juxtaposing this statuary with the hauntingly ephemeral installation The Ghost of Liberty Street Church, the chapter offers postpresentist inquiry as a method that regards the archive as an urgent and poignantly incomplete political project. Where historicist approaches emphasize distance and difference from history through periodization, and charges of presentism name historians’ overidentification with the past, postpresentism holds in view intimacy and distance between past and the present. The epilogue lays out postpresentist readings of sculptures of Harriet E. Wilson in Milford, New Hampshire; Winnemucca Hopkins and Sojourner Truth in the United States Capitol Rotunda; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Susan B. Anthony in Seneca Falls, New York. These statues’ site-specific installations bring into relief the raced, gendered, and colonial legacies of the grounds beneath their podia and feet.