Confederate Monuments and Constructed Memories
Talking with Dr. Karen Cox about why we can't shake the war
News broke in the last couple of days that two Confederate monuments—one to Confederate officer (and apparently wizard impersonator) Albert Pike, and the “Reconciliation Monument” of Arlington National Cemetery—would be reinstalled by the taxpayers. According to history fan/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of the latter monument, “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it.” You may remember Hegseth as the guy who stripped the name of USNS Harvey Milk.
I’ve made it clear how I feel about Confederate monuments, having grown up quite literally in the shadow of memorials to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, the latter being the site of the annual Griffey Family Union/Odd Discussion of the Word “Heritage.”
But I’m no expert. Fortunately Dr. Karen Cox is. She’s the author of numerous books on the South and its memory, so I invited her on to break all this down, plus talk about her storied career. Karen is a dear friend of mine, so enjoy this unfiltered, no holds barred take on American history, American memory, and academia.
In the clip below, Karen talks about the construction of the Lost Cause mythology:
We also speak to how immigrants responded to the Lost Cause in comparison to Latino communities’ shift towards Trump in 2024:
Here, I ask Karen about my hometown’s decision to leave a Confederate statue on the Courthouse Square:
About our guest:
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of four books, the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history and has written numerous essays and articles, including an essay for the New York Times best seller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, which was published in April 2021 and won the Michael V.R. Thomason book prize from the Gulf South Historical Association.
A successful public intellectual, Dr. Cox has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Huffington Post. She has given dozens of media interviews in the U.S. and around the globe, especially on the topic of Confederate monuments. She appeared in Henry Louis Gates’s PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Lucy Worsley’s American History’s Biggest Fibs for the BBC, and the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments.
Cox is a professor emerita of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she taught from 2002-2024. She is currently writing a book that explores themes of the Great Migration, the Black press, and early Chicago jazz through the forgotten tragedy of the Rhythm Club fire, which took the lives of more than 200 African Americans in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1940.
You can follow her on Bluesky @DrKarenLCox.bsky.social
The Pod
Without further ado, check out Dr. Karen Cox and I talking about Confederate monuments on Apple and Spotify below:
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As a Virginian living just north of Tampa, surrounded by New Yorkers… it did me so much good to hear both of your accents. 🥰 That the first thing. The second is that this conversation was brilliant. I grew up in Culpeper County, a mile south of Brandy Station on Old US 29. In the ‘60s the plowed fields around us would still turn up bit of CSA kit, because that’s where Jackson conducted his Grand Review of cavalry for Lee the day before the battle.
As you can imagine I took in the lost cause with my mother’s milk, CSA veterans on both sides of the family. And I was an unreconstructed rebel and Republican until 2007, when I became the librarian of a high-poverty (95-98% FRL) K-5 in Salisbury, North Carolina (Jason, that’s near Karen’s stomping ground of Charlotte). I began to realize that all that the GOP claimed to have done for my poor kids was a lie. dt was the last straw.
We had lived in Chicagoland when he was playing fast and loose with construction and contractors, and I didn’t like him then. Now I hate him and what he is doing to our country. But my dearly love husband of almost forty-nine years and our forty-four year old USN veteran son absolutely adore him. As do all the Yankees here in my county and in my church. Lonely little blue dot here.
So, back to this podcast. Thank you both, so very much, for teaching all of us about the disgrace that is happening in our National Cemetery in Arlington. The next time we take it down it needs to be melted into something useful, like plowshares.