After Charlottesville, local debates over the place of Confederate monuments in United States public places roared into the national spotlight. With a broad knowledge of the fields of study that have examined the history, policy, and cultural meanings of such monuments, University Press of Kansas Editor-in-Chief Joyce Harrison compiled for the Association a list of relevant university-press-published scholarship for us to share as part of the #CharlottesvilleCurriculum effort. There are many other deeply urgent aspects to what happened in Charlottesville on August 12, and several Association members have also compiled valuable resource lists under the #CharlottesvilleCurriculum tag. More can also be found in sections of the Books for Understanding: Race Relations in the US bibliography.
Compiled and introduced by Joyce Harrison
As more and more Confederate monuments and symbols are removed in US cities and towns, many people new to the issue have wondered why. Is it a bit extreme? Are we erasing history by removing them?
The books in this list were written by people who have spent their lives and careers studying how Americans remembered victory and defeat, how southerners honored the Confederate dead, and what monuments meant when they were built—and continue to mean—as our troubled past haunts us, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War.
University presses can help us understand and allow us to contribute to informed discussion and debate.
God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind
Barbara L. Bellow and Thomas Lawrence Connelly
LSU Press
1995
ISBN: 9780807120149
Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914
William A. Blair
University of North Carolina Press
2011
ISBN: 9781469624273
American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
David W. Blight
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press)
2013
ISBN: 9780674725973
Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War
David W. Blight
University of Massachusetts Press
2002
ISBN: 9781558493445
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
David W. Blight
Harvard University (Belknap Press)
2001
ISBN: 9780674008199
Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina
Thomas J. Brown
University of North Carolina Press
2015
9781469620954
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press)
2008
ISBN: 9780674027213
Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity
Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
2000
ISBN: 9780807848869
Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913
Kathleen Ann Clark
University of North Carolina Press
2005
ISBN: 9780807856222
Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865
Robert J. Cook
Johns Hopkins University Press
2017 (forthcoming)
ISBN: 9781421423494
Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965
Robert J. Cook
LSU Press
2011
ISBN: 9780807143650
The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem
John M. Coski
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press)
2006
ISBN 9780674019836
Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture
Karen L. Cox
University Press of Florida
2003
ISBN: 9780813028125
Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History
Karen L. Cox
University Press of Florida
2012
ISBN: 9780813060262
Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture
Karen L. Cox
University of North Carolina Press
2011
ISBN 9781469609867
Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity
Patricia G. Davis
University of Alabama Press
2016
ISBN: 9780817319212
The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy
William C. Davis
University Press of Kansas
1996
ISBN: 9780700612543
Sustaining Southern Identity: Douglas Southall Freeman and Memory in the Modern South
Keith D. Dickson
LSU Press
2011
ISBN: 9780807140048
Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America
Erika Doss
University of Chicago Press
2010
ISBN: 9780226159416
The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture
Edited by Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh
University of North Carolina Press
2004
ISBN: 978087855720
Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913
Gaines M. Foster
Oxford University Press
1988
ISBN: 9780195054200
Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War
Gary W. Gallagher
University of North Carolina Press
2008
ISBN: 9781469606835
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History
Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan
Indiana University Press
2000
ISBN: 9780253222664
Commemoration in America: Essays on Monuments, Memorialization, and Memory
Edited by David Gobel and Daves Rossell
University of Virginia Press
2013
ISBN: 9780813933733
Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History
David Goldfield
LSU Press
2013 (Updated Edition)
ISBN: 9780807152157
Your Heritage Will Still Remain: Racial Identity and Mississippi’s Lost Cause Michael J. Goleman
University Press of Mississippi
2017
ISBN: 9781496812049
Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War
Edited by Susan-Mary Grant and Peter J. Parish
LSU Press
2003
ISBN 9780807128473
Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction
Edited by Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta
Foreword by James W. Loewen
University of Texas Press
2008
ISBN: 9780292721623
Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans
M. Keith Harris
LSU Press
2014
ISBN: 9780807157725
Inventing Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History and Memory
Wallace Hettle
LSU Press
2011
ISBN: 9780807137819
Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory
Edited by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton
University of North Carolina Press
2009
ISBN: 9780807859162
Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause
Caroline E. Janney
University of North Carolina Press
2012
ISBN: 9780807872253
Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation
Caroline E. Janney
University of North Carolina Press
2016
ISBN: 978146962989
The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning
Edited by Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. and Randal Allred
University Press of Kentucky
2014
ISBN: 9780813143071
Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil War
William B. Lees and Frederick P. Gaske
University Press of Florida
2014
ISBN: 9780813049960
Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies
Sanford B. Levinson
Duke University Press
1998
ISBN: 9780822322207
The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause”
Edited by James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta
University Press of Mississippi
2010
ISBN: 9781604732191
Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State
Anne E. Marshall
University of North Carolina Press
2010
ISBN: 9781469609836
Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South
Edited by J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su
University Press of Florida
2001
ISBN: 9780813021003
The Ongoing Burden of Southern History: Politics and Identity in the Twenty-First-Century South
Edited by Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields, and Jeannie Whayne
LSU Press
2012
ISBN: 9780807147566
Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory
Edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson
University of Tennessee Press
2003
ISBN: 9781572332720
Honoring the Civil War Dead
John R. Neff
University Press of Kansas
2005
ISBN: 9780700622597
Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History
Alan T. Nolan
University of North Carolina Press
1996
ISBN: 9780807845875
Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry
W. Scott Poole
University of Georgia Press
2004
ISBN: 9780820325088
Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915
K. Stephen Prince
University of North Carolina Press
2014
ISBN: 9781469627281
A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868
Anne Sarah Rubin
University of North Carolina Press
2007
ISBN: 9780807855928
The Civil War in Art and Memory
Edited by Kirk Savage
Yale University Press
2016
ISBN: 9780300214680
Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America
Kirk Savage
Princeton University Press
1997
ISBN: 9780691009476
Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments
Timothy S. Sedore
Southern Illinois University Press
2011
ISBN: 9780809330324
The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900
Nina Silber
University of North Carolina Press
1997
ISBN: 9780807846858
The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America
Matthew E. Stanley
University of Illinois Press
2017
ISBN: 9780252082245
What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South
Dell Upton
Yale University Press
2015
ISBN: 9780300211757
Baptized in Blood: the Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920
Charles Reagan Wilson
University of Georgia Press
2009 (With a New Preface)
ISBN: 9780820334257
The Burden of Southern History
C. Vann Woodward
LSU Press
2008 (Updated Third Edition)
ISBN: 9780807133804
The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s
Bertram Wyatt-Brown
University of North Carolina Press
2001
ISBN: 9780807849125