No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

For a limited time FREE TO READ ONLINE.

Thanks to the press and the author, No Common Ground is free online in response “to the EO that included restoring monuments and memorials on federal property is a full-on embrace of Confederate ideology. Educate yourself about what this embrace means.”

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 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. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and “heritage” laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. [Adapted from publishers’ description.]

ISBN: 9781469662671 | University of North Carolina Press

For a limited time FREE TO READ ONLINE.

Praise

The definitive history of Confederate monuments and their surrounding controversies . . . . a masterful public-history analysis. — Rebecca Brenner Graham, The Society for U.S. Intellectual History

Essential. . . . Cox, a preeminent scholar of how the South has sought to reimagine and portray itself in the years since the Civil War . . . tracks the origins and spread of the statues and clears up misconceptions about how these sculptures came to liberally pepper our landscape…It is a robust accounting that links spikes in statue building to periods when White Southerners perceived threats to their control over institutions and wanted to reassert their dominance. . . . To read this book is to be reminded again that the history of Confederate Statues is not ancient, nor even old. — Washington Post

In her superb contribution to the history of the South, Cox targets the massive influence of the United Daughters of the Confederacy on Southerners in the late 1890s and beyond, especially in the area of monument building. . . . An invaluable study of all-too-frequently misplaced genealogical and regional venerations. Highly recommended for U.S., antebellum, Civil War, African American, and Southern historians and scholars, and for all readers. — Library Journal