About this item
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
About the Author
I'm a historian of the American South with a particular interest in southern culture. I am the author of four books--Dixie's Daughters (University Press of Florida, w/new intro 2019) , which won the Spruill prize for the best book in southern women's history, Dreaming of Dixie (UNC Press, 2011) , Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South (UNC Press, 2017) , and my latest, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (UNC Press, forthcoming 2021) . I am also the editor of Destination Dixie (University Press of Florida, 2012) , a volume on tourism and southern history, and co-editor of Revisiting the 1930s South (LSU Press, 2018) .
