Featured image: The 90-foot carving on the side of Stone Mountain in Georgia is the largest Confederate monument in the world. Image from the article, “KKK denied permit to burn cross atop symbolic mountain in Georgia.”

See also this collection of articles by historians in the wake of Charlottesville – from Made By History – and historian Kevin M. Levin’s Confederate monuments syllabus.         

BOOKS

David Allison: Controversial Monuments and Memorials.

Keisha N. Blain, Chad Williams, & Kidada E. Williams (editors). Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence.          

Thomas J. Brown: Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America.

Karen L. Cox: Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

Adam H. Domby: The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory.

Erika Doss: Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.    

Claudrena N. Harold & Louis P. Nelson (editors). Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity.        

Ethan J. Kytle & Blain Roberts: Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy.

Kevin Levin: Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites.   

Kevin Levin: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth.

Sanford Levinson: Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies.

Cynthia Mills & Pamela H. Simpson: Monuments To The Lost Cause: Women, Art, And The Landscapes Of Southern Memory.

Kirk Savage: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.

Nina Silber: This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America.

Dell Upton: What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South.

ARTICLES

Ana Lucia Araujo: Toppling monuments is a global movement. And it works. Global demonstrations to remove monuments to slavery and colonialism are retaking public spaces.

Bonnie Berkowitz & Adrian Blanco: Confederate monuments are falling, but hundreds still stand. Here’s where.

Keisha N. Blain: Tennessee just showed that white supremacy is alive and well: Honoring a former Confederate general and KKK grand wizard in 2019 is outrageous.

Keisha N. Blain: Destroying Confederate monuments isn’t ‘erasing’ history. It’s learning from it. Defenders of the memorials are the ones trying to forget the past.

Jordan Brasher: Confederate flags fly worldwide, igniting social tensions and inflaming historic traumas.

Michelle D. Brock, Sarah Horowitz, and Molly Michelmore: Why universities should be on the front lines of the monument wars.

Rebekah Bryer: Yes, D.C.’s Emancipation Memorial advances white supremacy: The statue needs more nuance that highlights black agency.

Niels Eichhorn: There’s no easy answer for Confederate monuments: Trying to add more context won’t prevent them from being rallying points for white supremacists and others.

Jonathan Beecher Field: Statue Mania: Focusing only on Confederate monuments misses that racism is memorialized everywhere.

Jonathan Beecher Field: Some Statues Are Like Barbed Wire: Activists fighting to remove statues of slavers and colonizers understand better than most how public memorials can be a form of violence.

Daniel L. Fountain: Why young Southerners still get indoctrinated in the Lost Cause:  Statues can be torn down. The lies on which they were built are harder to topple.

Samuel Gilbert: Protests target Spanish colonial statues that ‘celebrate genocide’ in US west.

Katrina Gulliver: Americans put up statues during the Gilded Age. Today we’re tearing them down: Why the Gilded Age was the era of statues.

Hilary Green: Map of Monument Removals, 2015-2020.

Michael D. Hattem: Columbus never set foot here. Why do we remember him? How our origin story has changed and adapted over time to suit modern political purposes.

Julian Maxwell Hayter:  Charlottesville was about memory, not monuments:  Why our history educations must be better.

Martha Hodes: Why some white Americans see racial equality as oppression: White victimhood’s roots in the Civil War.

Yuliya Komska:  What to do with Confederate monuments: Seven lessons from Germany.  Germany’s struggle with its brutal history provides a useful guide for Americans struggling with theirs.

Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders: Removing Lost Cause monuments is the first step in dismantling white supremacy: African American activists have long coupled these efforts with fighting against racist laws and racial violence.

Megan Kate Nelson: The latest battle over the Confederate flag isn’t happening where you’d expect: How the forgotten fight for the West exposes the meaning of the Confederate flag.

Megan Kate Nelson: Americans Need to Know the Hard Truth About Union Monuments in the West: During the Civil War, Union soldiers in the West weren’t fighting to end slavery, but to annihilate and remove Native Americans.

New York Times Editorial Board: Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy? It is time to rename bases for American heroes — not racist traitors.

Jennifer Odem: America’s Monuments, Reimagined for a More Just Future: With colonialist statues being toppled in America and beyond, T asked five artists to envision a different kind of memorial, one that embodies this moment of reckoning.

Byron D’Andra Orey: Here’s How Black Power Finally Prevailed in Mississippi State Flag Fight.

Jeffrey Ostler: Trump thinks Andrew Jackson’s statue is a great monument — but to what? The truth about policies of Native American removal.

Elaine Frantz Parsons: We Don’t Have Enough Contempt for Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Stuart Schrader: From Charleston to Rhodesia: Fights over both the Confederate and Rhodesian flags give us a glimpse into the reactionary mind. 

Ty Seidule: West Point and its cadets are not campaign props: Grass-roots civil rights activism — not Confederate monuments — is what heals society.

Nina Silber: Worshiping the Confederacy is about white supremacy — even the Nazis thought so.  Confederate memory nurtured fascism.

Nina Silber: ‘Gone With the Wind’ is also a Confederate monument, but on film instead of stone. Even in its time, the film promoted a racist political message.

Laura Ellyn Smith: It’s not just Confederate monuments that need to come down: Charlottesville focused attention on the Confederacy. But we need to reckon with the era of segregation as well.

Timothy Snyder: Take it from a historian. We don’t owe anything to Confederate monuments. Trump spends so much time defending statues not because he cares about history, but precisely because he doesn’t.

Brent Staples: Monuments to White Supremacy.

Brent Staples: When White Supremacists Ruled Washington: The National Cathedral Just This Month Removed Stained Glass Windows Depicting Confederate Generals.

Anne Twitty: Ole Miss’s Monument to White Supremacy: New evidence shows what the 30-foot-tall Confederate memorial was actually meant to commemorate.  

Kevin Waite: The missing statues that expose the truth about Confederate monuments: Why Confederacy supporters erased the legacy of one its most accomplished soldiers.

Caroline Randall Williams: You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument. The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

Jhacova Williams: Confederate Streets and Black-White Labor Market Differentials.

Victoria W. Wolcott: Six Flags has taken down its Confederate flag. But that’s not the only legacy of Jim Crow at the park.  The history of amusement parks exposes how colorblindness often masked racial exclusion. 

VIDEOS AND PODCASTS

A12:  A12 explores the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, the history behind the conflict, and how the city and its people have dealt with the aftermath.  Presented by historian Nicole Hemmer, who was present that day. 

Hilary Green and Kevin Levin: two scholars weigh in on the history of Confederate monuments.