Round Table
on Confederate Statues
and Memorialization

MODERATOR

Catherine Clinton holds the Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is a professor emerita of Queen’s University Belfast. She is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books. Her first book, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South, appeared in 1982, and her most recent, Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War (2016), is based on her Fleming Lectures, delivered at Louisiana State University in 2012. She was a consultant for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), following publication of her biography, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (2009). She is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and serves on the advisory board for Ford’s Theatre, President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, Civil War Times, and Civil War History. During 2016, she served as president of the Southern Historical Association and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently working on a study of Union soldiers and insanity during and after the Civil War.

PANELISTS

W. Fitzhugh Brundage has been the William B. Umstead Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2002. He has written on lynching, utopian socialism in the New South, white and black historical memory in the South since the Civil War, and African American participation in the creation of American popular culture. His most recent book traces debates about torture in the United States from the time of first European contact to the twenty-first century.

Karen L. Cox is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of three books and the coeditor of two others that examine southern history and culture. Her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, has been given a second life following the events in Charlottesville, where white supremacists rallied on the premise of defending a monument to Robert E. Lee. She has emerged as a national and international expert on the subject of Confederate monuments and has written several op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN. She’s given numerous interviews about the monument issue to the BBC, Newsweek, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Daily Beast, Mic, Mother Jones, and several other U.S. media outlets. She’s also been interviewed about Confederate monuments for news articles in the leading papers of Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Israel, Germany, France, and Japan.

Gary W. Gallagher, a native of Los Angeles, grew up in southern Colorado. He is the John L. Nau III Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia. The author or editor of more than forty books, he has written about how the military and civilian spheres intersected during the Civil War, how the Civil War generation remembered the conflict, and how the mid-nineteenth-century crisis resonates in recent American culture.

Nell Irvin Painter is the author of seven books, most recently The History of White People, which made her a media expert on white people in the age of Trump. She is the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita at Princeton University, where she taught the history of the South. In June 2018, Counterpoint Press published Old in Art School, her memoir of BFA and MFA study in painting at an advanced age. She completed an artist’s residency at the Brodsky Center printmaking studio in 2017.

CLINTON: To begin, I want each of you to recall your first contact with a Confederate statue or memorial and what your response was.

GALLAGHER: My first exposure to the Confederate memorial landscape was in the summer of 1965 when my mother and my grandmother and I drove from southern Colorado, where I lived, to battlefields in the East, and the first monuments I saw were in Vicksburg. We stopped where we crossed the Mississippi River, and I have a vivid memory. The one stuck in my mind was that of the sort of wild statue of Lloyd Tilghman¹ in Vicksburg. He seems to just be hit with an electric shock of some kind. And I took a picture of it with my Browning Brownie camera, which I had at the time. There is probably still a print floating around somewhere. I’ve been a hopeless Civil War buff since I was fourteen. It started when I was about nine, so for me the predominant feeling that I had was I am actually in a place where these things I’ve been reading about for so many years happened. There are not a lot of big Civil War battlefields in the southern part of the San Luis Valley in Colorado. That trip was the big “Here I am; this is where it actually happened.” Obviously, I didn’t attach any kind of political significance to it or have any notion of memory or anything like that. It was just, “There’s Lloyd Tilghman, … and there’s a statue of him.”

CLINTON: Share who he was.

GALLAGHER: Lloyd Tilghman was a Confederate general. I’m sorry, we shouldn’t assume anything. The Confederate general Lloyd Tilghman. It was the statue of him …

CLINTON: Was this a pilgrimage?

[Laughter]

GALLAGHER: A kind of third-tier general.

CLINTON: Was it your idea to go to Vicksburg? Or your family took you there?

GALLAGHER: Oh no, no …, we didn’t have family vacations. I lived on a farm, and we didn’t take any vacations, but my father let us go. We had twelve days, and we drove from Alamosa to Gettysburg and back in twelve days. I was allowed to go because I was in charge of irrigating our fields, and it’s twelve days in between when we did that. My grandmother was the key. She bought me Civil War books when I was a little boy. She was the most wonderful influence. And so she kept a diary—I have her diary of the trip, which is really wonderful.

PAINTER: I grew up in California, so I didn’t grow up with any Civil War memorials. Out west, in the Bay area, it was the Spanish past and the missions, though I always knew that the missions were kind of “iffy.” I grew up in a left-wing household which was pan-African and attuned to the history of the American South. So, as far as Confederate memorials, I saw a whole bunch of them when I did dissertation research. I’m from California, and I love to drive. I drove all over. This was the early seventies, so you had to go to places, and I just drove all over the place in my vw Beetle—and with Massachusetts plates. And everybody said, “Aren’t you afraid to go to the South with Massachusetts plates?” But I was fearless at that point. So I saw in my dissertation research all these sort of southern commemorations. And I thought, “Ugh, this is ancient history; it has nothing to do with me—all these crazy people.” And I really didn’t engage with them mentally. They were just part of a historical landscape. When I really started focusing was in the 1980s, when I taught at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. And of course, there’s a Confederate soldier …

GALLAGHER: Silent Sam.²

PAINTER: Silent Sam, yes. My sense of Silent Sam was that he was part of this local history which also had nothing to do with me. But I found it did kind of have something to do with me because, being from the Bay area and not being able to deal with heat and humidity, I also had to leave in the summer. So I would go to Maine in the summer and drive through Portland, Maine, which has a huge Union memorial. I would love to see that. I would just love to see that Union memorial, and it was like, “Ahh, I’m free” in the sense of free from the South of my everyday day-job life, and here I am in friendly territory. So that was my first real grappling with memorials of the Civil War.

But I should add that my husband and I did a semester in Berlin in 2001. We went to Berlin in part for Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past. Germans have been doing this very thoughtfully for a long time. I got involved with this field—with Germany being part of it—after [Daniel] Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. He got so much flack for that book. When it came out, we were actually in France, and maybe this was the French translation, but I read it, and I thought, “This needs to be done for American history.” This was like in the nineties, when I first started thinking about coming to terms with the past, as historians were doing it, so from the nineties into the early part of the century. Then my book The History of White People [2010] appeared and was, in a way, this continuing engagement with the changing past.

BRUNDAGE: So the monument that I remember vividly as a child was a Confederate soldier monument in front of the old courthouse in Leesburg, Virginia. My mother’s family was from Leesburg, and part of my childhood I grew up there. My cousin and I particularly would play there a lot, but they had an interesting effect on me. I was actually born in Pennsylvania, and then growing up in Loudoun County, I was a Civil War buff from the age of six on. But I was a Pennsylvania Zouave.³ My mother made a Pennsylvania Zouave outfit for me.

PAINTER: Oh, lovely.

BRUNDAGE: And I went to every battlefield, virtually every major battlefield of the South in my Pennsylvania Zouave outfit.

PAINTER: Terrific!

BRUNDAGE: And I even took pride in the first book I wrote. I was nine years old writing a novel about the Civil War which I still have …

GALLAGHER: What printing is it in?

[Laughter]

BRUNDAGE: Unfortunately, it’s a private printing, but I love it. It has a preface, although I spelled preface “perface.” And in the “perface,” I say, “this is written from a northern point of view.” So, in its own way, the monuments did not have the intended effect on me at all. But I have, I would say, the kind of childhood nostalgia for that monument just in the sense that it was there. But I will tell you, there has never been a Confederate monument that moved me. It didn’t have that effect on me.

GALLAGHER: Did you have a fez with your Zouave outfit?

BRUNDAGE: Unfortunately, my mother didn’t know how to make one. But it was pretty good looking, I’ll tell you. To see a nineyear-old running around on the battlefield with the flowing pants, with the piping—it was a good … it was a good look.

COX: Well, I don’t have any childhood stories of a monument. I was born in West Virginia and our family relocated to Greensboro, North Carolina. I don’t even recall confronting anything like this. So my first experiences with Confederate memorialization were in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I was a historian for the Museum of Cape Fear, and one of my colleagues was a woodworker, and he had salvaged wood and made things with them. He would make benches and make toys, or whatever, and he salvaged from the Confederate Woman’s Home which was in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And he came to me and said, “I like to give a little history on, you know, where my benches come from, where the wood is salvaged from.” Essentially, he asked me to research the home. That’s what got me started on writing the book on the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I researched it. I went to where the Confederate Woman’s Home was, which is actually kind of interesting. It was located next to Terry Sanford High School in Fayetteville. I saw this photograph of the day of the opening of this women’s home, and there were hundreds of people there; all of these women were standing up in front, because they had been the ones driving this project and getting a state to take care of these women. And the state took over financing of the home, which they did until 1982. And so, the home had long been torn down, but there was still the cemetery where they buried the women who had been there, and it looked like a military cemetery. They had similar headstones that went throughout and so that was my first engagement with …

CLINTON: With a memorial.

COX: Yeah.

CLINTON: Statue or memorial? … was what I was asking about …

COX: Yeah, well the first one that I had been researching a long time was the Arlington Confederate Monument, which is a beautiful monument. You know, the United Daughters of the Confederacy …

GALLAGHER: The Moses Ezekiel monument.⁴

COX: Yeah, the Moses Ezekiel monument. The UDC hired the best artists for their work. They put bids out for designs, and artists from all over the country would bid on this. So for me, it was like I knew the narrative the monument offered was a southern narrative, a pro-Confederate narrative. But it was, it’s still beautiful nonetheless. It’s a piece of art and piece of sculpture for me. It was like, when I was an undergraduate and I was studying art history in a class and I got to the National Gallery and saw the Hudson River valley paintings for the first time. I was overwhelmed by it. And likewise, after having read about all the efforts to put this monument up and then seeing it for the first time, seeing it, you know, the size of it and the scale of it, I had this similar feeling like I had been reading about this in school. Or, in this case, I had been researching it for a long time. And to see this in person was really impressive, even though I knew the darker history behind what was intended by those who put it up there.

CLINTON: Well, I sent out a few preliminary questions. So I’m really interested in asking about your sense that you are sometimes a historian or sometimes an observer in the world. And I’m interested in how these monuments can tell us about the past in different ways, in multilevel ways. I just participated in a symposium at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville where we talked about artistic representation. Indeed, we had artists there to talk about southern symbols amidst the controversy. But, just in reflection, does anyone have anything to contribute on the issue of artistic representation?

PAINTER: This is not so much artistic; it’s more discourse. Actually, it was the year that I was president of the Southern Historical Association (2007). The meeting was in Richmond, and one of my former students was teaching there. He took my husband and me to the Jefferson Davis memorial, which is mostly, I mean, it’s kind of anodyne pillars and such, but its text is the most tortured use of the English language that I have ever seen. That was what’s really struck me.

CLINTON: How so?

PAINTER: Its full of “that which is’s.”

[Laughter]

PAINTER: These really convoluted sentences that to me were sort of anal retentive. I actually took pictures of the language because it was so remarkable and so uncomfortable.

GALLAGHER: Similar to the language in Stephens’s Constitutional bill View of the Late War between the States, which is torture and very hard to work through.⁵ Obviously, trying to change something that everybody knows was another way, but now we are going to pretend it’s this way.

PAINTER: Yeah!

GALLAGHER: Virtually unreadable.

PAINTER: It is virtually unreadable and it’s … so unreadable you think, “Oh, you know, he is hiding things. He is keeping secrets. He’s also all tensed up.” So you know, this is not visual art in that same way.

CLINTON: Right, right.

PAINTER: But I think the language is really revealing.

BRUNDAGE: I think the artistic representation extends widely from not only the “store-bought” monuments that were produced by northern foundries and shipped wherever, but also there were obelisks that drew upon cemetery artwork and funereal themes. If you didn’t know the obelisk was a Confederate monument, you would think it was conventional cemetery art. The range of artistic expressions varies widely. But I think most people, when they think of a Confederate memorial, think of the common solider monument that stands in front of a courthouse as a genre. There are the exceptions, which may be grandiose like those for Lee and Jefferson Davis on Monument Avenue in Richmond, or it could be …

CLINTON: An obelisk in St Louis.

BRUNDAGE: Yeah, or the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Kentucky that is gigantic.⁶

GALLAGHER: It’s huge—three hundred feet.

BRUNDAGE: Yeah. Stone Mountain⁷ being the extreme example: so imposing that you cannot help but recognize it and the other large monuments as artistic, as ambitiously aesthetic. But then, there are so many that are far less ambitious. So I just want to stress that it’s important to acknowledge that many Confederate monuments are not Bernini sculptures.

COX: No.

CLINTON: No?

COX: No.

PAINTER: A friend of mine wrote a column in the [New York] Times, Sarah Lewis, an art historian. She wrote a column about the Confederate flag and the difficulty that Confederates had in agreeing on a flag that would project what they were about—which was about slavery—which they could also take abroad. So, you know, some people tried stuff with colors of people; white on the top and black on the bottom, things like that. And they realized that would not fly in, say, Europe. And so what they finally ended up with was a flag that was a battle flag, which kind of says, “Okay, this is a fight. This is all we can do.” Because the goal of the Confederacy was unspeakable, or un … unpaintable, or un … unprintable in a sense.

CLINTON: At the art exhibit I was at [Southern Accent: Seeking the American Southern Contemporary Art, Speed Art Museum, April 30–October 14, 2017], the art of Sonya Clark showed viewers the actual surrender flag at Appomattox, which was made out of flour sacks. So fascinating because symbols have meanings depending on when you are looking at them, how you are looking at them.

GALLAGHER: But the Confederate flags are complicated because there was such an array of flags used. Different armies used different flags, and the one we think of as the Confederate flag, the one a lot of people call the Stars and Bars—the St. Andrews cross flag—that is not the Stars and Bars and was not the national flag. It wasn’t used so widely in the Army in Tennessee and other places. I mean, we have all come to agree on what the Confederate flag is because of the ways it was used after the war. And that’s really a postwar sense of what the flag was, how it was used and deployed, and by whom—after the war.

CLINTON: Well … that was my next question. What do these particular monuments and symbols reflect about the American Civil War versus what they reflect about the period in when they were erected. And, of course, I know, Fitz, you’ve done a lot of work on that recently and found a lot of surprises.

BRUNDAGE: Could you rephrase that again?

CLINTON: About your recent work on monuments … and when they were erected …

BRUNDAGE: Oh, okay.

CLINTON: This has been quite an opportunity, just the idea that it isn’t always, you know, a Civil War monument. We as historians need to teach people it’s also a monument reflecting the period in which it’s erected.

COX: Well …

BRUNDAGE: Go ahead, Karen.

COX: I have written about it, so I often tell people that monuments are a reflection of the generation that got them built. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a World War II memorial or a Confederate monument. And certainly, there were some in the works before the Daughters of the Confederacy was founded in the 1890s. But from about the mid-1890s through World War I, when the vast majority were erected, it was a reflection of the values of that generation more than it was about the Confederacy. On the one hand, it was paying homage to their ancestors at some point. But it always came with a lot of ritual and ceremony and speeches that really identified what the monuments represented, which is why at the unveiling of Silent Sam, Julian Carr is talking about Anglo-Saxon supremacy. I was surprised to learn that, you know, even in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1929, there was a reunion of veterans there. And during that time, they put up a monument that used language about these men as preservers of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, which is pretty late in monument building. Often the defenders of the monuments are saying we are erasing history if we remove these things. They need to ask themselves what history would be erased. No history is being erased. It’s still going to be there. But they seem to have a disconnect between the period in which they were placed and the Civil War South.

GALLAGHER: I think it’s important not to treat all monuments as being the same. I think a number of things that are written in the wake of Charlottesville⁸ sort of flattens out the Confederate memorial landscape and treats them as if they are all the same—and they really are not the same. Women were so involved in the early memorialization … Using Charlottesville as an example, the earliest monument in Charlottesville is in the cemetery; it’s on the university grounds, …

COX: Oh sure.

GALLAGHER: … Went up in 1893, and it was the ladies, the equivalent of a Ladies’ Memorial Association—pre-UDC—who were the key people there. The tablets that were on the Rotunda at the University of Virginia and the one in front of the courthouse downtown were the same. It combines the things that Karen was talking about. They are sort of similar in some ways to the ones you see in little villages in England everywhere.

COX: Right.

GALLAGHER: I think the later ones in Charlottesville—the huge equestrian ones in Charlottesville of Jackson and Lee—I would put in a different class. And the Lee statue in Charlottesville went up in 1924. The speeches there were very similar in some ways to the comments made one year later in Congress when they decided to make Arlington the national memorial to R. E. Lee. This is part of a much broader stream. That same year the United States minted a half dollar with Lee and Jackson on it—1925, and Arlington was 1925. So I think it’s important to put some of these monuments within the context of a much broader phenomenon that was going on. Quite a different meaning in the early 1890s and right at the turn of the century.

COX: I agree with that. I think the monuments follow the phases of the Lost Cause, and so, in the initial phrases, there was really a lot about bereavement, and that’s why those first monuments were in cemeteries.

GALLAGHER: Yes, yes.

CLINTON: And where to return them when they are removed becomes an interesting question. In San Antonio, in a large square, on top of a very tall obelisk was a soldier and the only text was “lest we forget.”⁹

GALLAGHER: That is great …

[Laughter]

CLINTON: That monument also happened to be the only soldier monument that I know of so far that was designed by a woman. So a female artist created this …

GALLAGHER: Elisabet Ney¹⁰ sculpted that incredible recumbent statue of Albert Sidney Johnston¹¹ in the state cemetery in Austin.

CLINTON: Yes, that’s true.

GALLAGHER: It’s very like the recumbent statue of Lee that Edward Valentine did in Lexington, Virginia, at Washington and Lee University.

CLINTON: Two Texas monuments designed by women. But in San Antonio, it’s been removed at night by the city council, and I’m interested in finding out where it will end up. Returning it to a cemetery in our particular city is a problem because of where the Confederate cemetery is in relation to communities, etc. Gary brought up the point of flattening. So we as historians may, when we advocate for any number of solutions, see flattening as also a problem.

BRUNDAGE: Could I just jump back to the timing? There has been another boom in addition to the 1890–1930 boom, namely from 1990 to the present. If you look at the chronology of the Confederate monument construction, it wanes substantially during the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, but since 1990, the number of new monuments has gone up. And it has mainly gone up because of monuments erected at battlefields. And these new monuments have been erected by a combination of Civil War buffs and/or the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

CLINTON: So to what do you attribute the increase, as you’re charting this?

BRUNDAGE: Right. I think it’s important to recognize there are still Confederate monuments going up today. A few have been put up in public spaces other than Civil War battlefield sites. But by erecting monuments on battlefields, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have found a safe ground. Within reason, you can put up almost anything on a battleground site, especially if it’s a state battlefield.

GALLAGHER: It’s not National Park Services.

BRUNDAGE: Yeah, if it’s not National Park Services. Especially if the battlefield is a state site, and especially at an undeveloped state battlefield site, that they want to turn into a historic attraction. For example, Bentonville battlefield in North Carolina—very few people visit Bentonville, unless they’re from nearby or they’re driving up i-95 and want a break from the monotony.

GALLAGHER: Tell our readers where Bentonville is.

BRUNDAGE: Oh, Bentonville is in North Carolina.

PAINTER: Oh, North Carolina. I’m thinking Arkansas.

BRUNDAGE: Bentonville was a March 1865 battle in North Carolina that today is not heavily visited. Given that the site was underdeveloped up until the 1990s, park officials have obviously been quite eager to add monuments and develop the site. So the Sons of Confederate Veterans have been gradually erecting monuments there. It’s a space where they can continue to give voice to their enthusiasm for the Confederacy, a space where they can do what they want with almost no oversight, no criticism, no politics involved. But their success speaks to the fact there is still energy in a small community to commemorate the Confederacy today.

GALLAGHER: I think powerful politicians play a role too. At Gettysburg and Mississippi, monuments have gone up—and there is a Maryland monument. If there is a member, especially in the Senate, who is interested in getting something done, even in a place like Gettysburg, you can get it done. Normally, they would not allow that.

PAINTER: You know, I’m going to add something to that, and I am guessing here. I am just going to guess. The other day I was sitting at the dinner table with my husband, who had gotten an honor, and I said, “Oh, look, you’re a shining star no matter who you are.” You remember that?

COX: Yes!

PAINTER: Earth, Wind, and Fire.

COX: Yeah!

PAINTER: So he had never heard of them, so I went and found Earth, Wind, and Fire. I found it in 1970, and they did music that was both pop music, rhythm and blues, jazz, everything. And when I thought about that time, after civil rights, things kind of calmed down, early seventies, very multicultural, very Motown. We were getting all mixed up in the seventies, and so I’m wondering—if, regarding Reagan and also “southern strategy”—now looking at the time we’re in, we see this attempt to put everybody back in his or her boxes. That was part of what was going on post-Reagan—let’s get everybody back in his or her boxes. And it certainly happened with popular music. So there’s that crossover that was going on in the seventies with Earth, Wind, and Fire and the Motown people. That was not happening in the 1990s and early 2000s, so I think there’s a cultural side to this as well, kind of meta, to reestablish order.

COX: Oh God, that’s what I thought when I saw what went down in Charlottesville. This is what it is about: even white supremacists knew this was a symbol of whiteness. And if you were to read their manifesto, it is anti-immigrant, antifeminist, anti-LGBT, anti- …

PAINTER: Anti-whatever. I bet they hate Earth, Wind, and Fire.

GALLAGHER: I bet they haven’t heard of Earth, Wind, and Fire. That would be my guess.

CLINTON: I’ve been struck by teaching the Civil War now for years in Texas. I recently came across so many Texans, but also other contemporary country singers, who both compose and sing Civil War songs. I have been exposed to, for example, a song called “Dixieland” [by Steve Earle], and when someone approached me with it, I was … “uh-oh,” but it was amazing. It’s a story about an Irish immigrant who immigrates and ends up fighting against the Confederacy … in Dixie. A whole raft of songs emerged in the postcentenary era. And I’m also thinking about my poor darling little battlefield in Missouri, my home state, Wilson Creek, where they decided, “Let’s build this up. Let’s make this into something.” Back to Fitz’s point, about the mobilization for tourism. The twenty-first-century political agenda: maybe it’s projecting a tourist agenda.

PAINTER: Uhumm.

CLINTON: Maybe it’s projecting a “stop on the road.”

GALLAGHER: In Charlottesville, the man who paid for the big statues in Charlottesville was named Paul Goodloe McIntire, and he put four big ones downtown, not just Lee and Jackson but also one of Lewis and Clark, with a kind of kneeling Sacagawea behind it, and also one of George Rogers Clark. They cluster around the heart of downtown and were kind of part of the city beautiful movement in the early 1920s. Also, I think they were about McIntire, who wanted to say, “Look what I did.” And to come back to one of Karen’s points about the women—the women are not involved in those four monuments. There is a gender difference in the way that some of this memorialization is done. The women are heavily involved in the early ones, the ones that are more about grieving …

COX: In the same period though, they were a driving force behind Stone Mountain and …

GALLAGHER: Oh no, no, no. I absolutely understand that, but both with the Ladies’ Memorial Associations and then with UDC, there is a different kind of involvement with these equestrian statues. The men specially excluded women from the Lee statue movement in Richmond, for example.

COX: Well, that’s a … that’s a big switch because they needed the women’s help fundraising to get …

GALLAGHER: Absolutely!

COX: To get the monuments up on Monument Avenue. Yeah, that is definitely a switch. I think also, too, by that time, the UDC had peaked. They felt like they may have an accomplished their goals.

GALLAGHER: What’s the peak in membership for the UDC?

COX: I think it’s World War I.

CLINTON: You know, Karen, I was shocked when I went there to work in their archives, in the seventies, to find out the average age of membership, at the time, was women in their forties.

COX: No, they were young.

CLINTON: But I remember thinking, “There’s a new wave.”

COX: They were young. People assumed they were aged women, but they weren’t. They were young women. And so what you see is, you begin to see generational differences, and maybe that is where some of this gender difference in terms of who’s putting up monuments. Or it’s the money, or how they are doing this. Because for the longest time, they were complaining that men weren’t helping them.

GALLAGHER: And they weren’t helping them. That is why they were complaining.

COX: Exactly!

CLINTON: What about Texas, Gary? The problem in terms of the twenty-first-century response to the statuary at the University of Texas …

GALLAGHER: Sure.

CLINTON: And having the president [of the University of Texas Austin] say he took [it] down “for symmetry.” I believe he was pressed on why he took down the statue of Woodrow Wilson as well as Jefferson Davis.

GALLAGHER: For balance because they—Wilson and Davis—flanked George Washington. They were there when I was a graduate student at the University of Texas in the seventies …

BRUNDAGE: Visual balance.

GALLAGHER: Yes, visual balance. Never mind that Lee was Woodrow Wilson’s greatest hero, and he, Wilson, wrote a biography of him. Anyway, that was an issue into the midseventies, when I was a graduate student—what to do with statues on that part of the campus that runs away from the tower at Texas. And it has come up periodically over the years. Students sort of discover them every once in a while, and the issue flares up and then drops down. But this time it didn’t.

BRUNDAGE: May I go back and make one more point.

CLINTON: Please.

BRUNDAGE: I think it’s interesting that we are talking about Confederate memorializing, and there’s no equivalent in Union memorialization to the role women play in Confederate memorialization. And …

COX: No, they had an organization—but it wasn’t nearly as active.

GALLAGHER: And they had a United States government doing a lot of things. The women stepped in and did things … especially with the UDC. I mean there’s a tremendous difference in that regard in terms of how memory and memorialization play out between the winners and the losers.

CLINTON: And a memorial to Elizabeth Thorn,¹² who buried the dead at Gettysburg, was only built in the last decade maybe?

GALLAGHER: Yes! And until then, there was only Jennie Wade¹³ at Gettysburg.

BRUNDAGE: I think that’s an important point because I think often most people don’t see Union monuments unless they are looking for them. But the Confederate monuments are conspicuous because the Confederates lost, and yet they have monuments …

CLINTON: Do you think that’s the major feature: being conspicuous, where they’re placed?

BRUNDAGE: Well, just partially, but what I was going to say is white southerners knew they were losing the commemorative battle. Most people don’t pay attention to the fact that Washington, D.C., is an enormous shrine to Union generals. There are big, beautiful, impressive monuments to Union generals all over the city. If you stack up the Confederate memorials across the South against Union memorials … and the Union cause always has Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts monument in Boston, which trumps anything. The Confederate monuments often pale by comparison. Many of the monuments that were put up in the South, in terms of aesthetic significance and power, are underwhelming. White southerners were in an arms race with the North to create monuments to the Lost Cause, and they were losing it, and they knew it. They talked about that all the time. And then of course there was the rest of American history as well that northerners were claiming as their creation; Plymouth Rock, Boston and the Revolution, etc. So white southerners were acutely aware of the competition to control history, and that history was being written elsewhere by other people.

CLINTON: They lost Thanksgiving.¹⁴

[Laughter]

GALLAGHER: And on Fitz’s point about how the Union memorial landscape is really kind of invisible for most people: I love to ask groups to whom I speak, “Where’s Grant’s memorial in Washington?” They say, “Oh no, it’s in New York.” I say, “I’m not talking about his tomb. Where is Grant’s monument in Washington?” Virtually no one knows. And it’s this huge equestrian statue looking right down the mall.

COX: Yeah.

GALLAGHER: It’s in the place where you’d want to be. They don’t even know it’s there. They don’t even know it’s there.

BRUNDAGE: And they got off at Metro stops Farragut or McPherson.

GALLAGHER: They don’t know …

BRUNDAGE: They’re not even thinking these are Union generals. McClellan …

GALLAGHER: Even George B. McClellan¹⁵ has an equestrian statue.

CLINTON: Isn’t the equestrian statue the issue? Because again, I’m really struck by the first encounter with a monument. I’m thinking as a child, someone on horseback is just someone on horseback and who they were associated with comes later. Is that a possibility? And we’re talking about the ways in which monuments strike us or … we don’t recognize them. They’re all over Washington. Of course, the Lincoln Memorial, you’re dealing with …

COX: I don’t know if you know about who created the Stonewall Jackson monument on horseback back in Manassas; it looks like he’s been in the gym for six months.¹⁶

GALLAGHER: He’s on steroids. He’s Jackson … and his horse too.

COX: It’s like he’s all buff.

PAINTER: Is this the one where he’s shooting?

COX: No, no.

GALLAGHER: No, he is like this. [Gesture, fist on hip]

COX: He looks like he’s, you know, like an Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.

GALLAGHER: And so is his horse.

[Laughter]

COX: I want to reflect on what was said about this monument arms race. I remember that being a comment about Shiloh Battlefield and about how there had been all these monuments to Union soldiers. And the UDC in that area wanted to do something, and they couldn’t put up the numbers, but they could raise enough money to build one big one that would outshine the rest. And so that’s what they did. And that one is a kind of interesting, because it’s a national landmark.

GALLAGHER: It’s very interesting. They complained the same way at Gettysburg. Gettysburg has nearly fifteen hundred monuments, and the overwhelming majority are Union. Many regimentals, but the Confederate states put up their big monuments there, and the latest was … Mississippi and Alabama, Louisiana in the seventies.

CLINTON: Some of them are quite beautiful, aesthetically as well.

GALLAGHER: That Gutzon Borglum for North Carolina, it’s an amazing monument.

CLINTON: So again, we are talking about the aesthetics of these things. Well, how do the Union monuments inform our debate today, or do they?

GALLAGHER: I don’t think they do. You asked about first encounters with Confederate monuments. I encountered two Union monuments as a boy in Colorado—one in the state veterans’ cemetery, where they had a Union soldier in the middle of the cemetery, and there is one in the plaza at Santa Fe which was put up in 1868. It’s one of the very earliest Union monuments. It’s an obelisk, and it talks to the defenders of the Union—put up by the legislature of the territory of New Mexico in 1866, ’7, and ’8, as it says on it.¹⁷

CLINTON: So we look at the way in which monuments can give us new insight by directing our attention … Yet you’re a buff. But I think maybe most people do wander in to read inscriptions to get an idea. I’m saying the encounter …

GALLAGHER: This is a buff too. [Points to Brundage] I am not the only buff here.

[Laughter]

GALLAGHER: He was even younger than I was.

CLINTON: But if we could put on our historian hats for a minute and … can we think about how we conduct a conversation or a debate, particularly in a classroom or in a public forum where many of us have had to encounter hard, tough questioning? Are we able to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the current state of controversy, in terms of removal, with a very highly charged debate going on? Certainly if government takes a position, as it has in many cities, and then conducts its business in the dark of night, you know, it speaks to a lot of controversial issues. So if we as historians are trying to inform people, can each of you think of a way in which to frame the debate pro and con? Is that a possibility?

PAINTER: Yeah, I was thinking about a conversation I had last night with historians, and these were young historians who had gotten their PhDs at North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And one woman said that her activism was to take walking tours, and Catherine mentioned the Stolpersteine.¹⁸ Those don’t exist, and they should exist in the U.S. There should be a stone that makes you stumble and remember what is no longer there. We don’t have that. But if you take people on a walking tour, which are prime tourist attractions, you can point out things. And something you said, Karen, which really struck me, which I had not thought of before, which was highlighting the speeches around the establishment of these monuments. That, I think, would be really useful.

CLINTON: If there’s no monument there, then how does that conversation take place or that walking tour take place? Do you say, “This is the site of a former monument”?

PAINTER: Yeah, you say, “This is the site, and this is what people said.”

CLINTON: Do you have a plaque? Again, because at one point the debate centered on replaquing or “countermonuments.” I’m just going to confess that in print I have advocated for countermonuments. I thought effective ones might have been established. But I’m not going to talk about Confederate countermonuments right now, yet I am a big fan of Kara Walker.¹⁹ I am going to say that I thought, just in the middle of all this, and again at the end of our conversation, I want to bring Stolperstein and other issues into the debate. Recently statuary debates exploded over a bronze installation of a young girl with her arms akimbo being put up on Wall Street, facing down the gigantic stock market bronze bull that was there. And the bull, by the way, was just dropped onto the sidewalk by some group, not “authorized.” And decades later the girl statue gets dropped in, and there’s a dramatic “you take that statue out!” response by conservatives. So a good example of the debate over the politics of space. And I was trying to suggest at the beginning that people might respond to a horse statue which represents what happened beyond the Civil War? So if you remove it, do you get to have that discussion?

PAINTER: You have a stone there that says, “This is what was here.” And you have a walking tour that says, “This is what they said when they put down what was here.”

GALLAGHER: I’ve used the Charlottesville memorial landscape for twenty years. I’ve been at the University of Virginia for twenty years, and I’ve given walking tours going from the cemetery to the Rotunda to downtown, where the three statues cluster. And I read from the dedicatory speeches. There are wonderful ways to get at the difference between history and memory—for example, the inscriptions on the monuments. The one in the cemetery has the classic “fate denied them victory”—which is the great Lost Cause “we never could have won” argument. There it is, in a very succinct way. Of course, they didn’t think that at the time. I find the monuments splendid teaching tools. We finish at the Lee monument, and there I point out it’s not just Charlottesville doing this. This is going on in Washington; this is going on at the U.S. Mint and so forth. I found the landscape very useful.

CLINTON: And the landscape in Charlottesville, as I understand it, is intended to change with a new memorial being proposed.

GALLAGHER: Liz Varon and I have been pushing to have a monument … We’ve been doing research at the Nau Center at uva. We found more than 250 black men from Albemarle County who fought in U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) units. The old number was zero, and the new number is 250. We think a monument in what’s now called Emancipation Park, a memorial to the USCT men from Albemarle County, would make sense. So this would create a place where you could literally show how memory changes. The Lee statue is 1924, but this is whatever—2017. This is the Civil War and how it’s played out. It has a lot of interpretive and explanatory potential. But we are a democracy, and if somebody votes to take them down, take them down.

COX: The headlines of my op-eds were like, you know, misleading about what I was really trying to say …

GALLAGHER: Karen, they actually were misleading. You didn’t write the headlines.

COX: Right, I don’t write the headlines. It was something like, “Why monuments must fall.” I didn’t write that. What I said was because these are all locally produced monuments that … the community is the place where those decisions should be made. A community evolves, and if the community decided that they wanted to remove it, then they should. I just said, “They had a moral responsibility to consider it.”

GALLAGHER: There should be a process, though. Not just knocking it down.

COX: Exactly! A process. And so I was in Greenwood, Mississippi, and there was a woman who would take me around places, and we went to the Confederate monument there. And she told me a little about the history behind the monument and how locals had posed for some of the figures that are around the monument. And she said they had actually gotten together, a group of local citizens, to talk about what they want to do with it. Conversely, in the little Charlestown, West Virginia, where the six women who are descendants of slaves had petitioned to have this plaque removed from the courthouse which was put up in 1986, not …

GALLAGHER: Eighty-six?

COX: 1986, which was a rebuke of the Martin Luther King holiday. The head of the commission just shot the petitioners down. And they quote Trump, you know, that this is a slippery slope. What’s going to be next? Even when a large number of the community came to the commission meeting, including a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who was one of the members who helped put the plaque up, and was now asking for it to be removed. They shut it all down. And it was interesting to me …

PAINTER: Karen, who is “they”?

COX: The local commissioners in Charlestown, West Virginia—five white members. And so it’s interesting to me that they put out this long explanation of their new ordinance that nothing can be removed, which is what states across the South are doing. And it’s interesting to me how they adopt this language, then kind of flip it back on progressive people, and they say, “Well, we are a diverse community. We are against violence. We’re against this and that. We don’t want to do something that would create that scenario. So we are not going to take this down.” But they wouldn’t even listen to reason. Because it is West Virginia, let’s create a memorial that says we honor all Civil War soldiers, and we also commemorate or acknowledge the enslaved community that was here. But they just shut it down.

CLINTON: So is the removal of Confederate statues an acknowledgment of the descendants of the enslaved in that particular community? Is it being removed in order to recognize emancipation, for example? Therefore, we as historians … let’s pat ourselves on the back a bit for our pretty good job from the centenary to the sesquicentennial redefining the American Civil War as a war about slavery. If you studied the centenary and look at the politics of slavery, look at the politics of race, look at what happened in 1960–65 compared to the recent sesquicentennial, our current transformation challenges those Confederate memorials: memorialization established to rebuke the war’s outcome, our national history. We are having a battle in textbooks. We’re having a battle in flags. We’re having referendums in states. We as historians are having an impact. Currently, we are being asked to moderate, to intervene. I’m sure every one of you has been asked to contribute to this debate. I’m trying to get at the issue that we as scholars are expected to argue pro and con. But when we are in the media spotlight, or when we are thrust into the headlines written for us, we often get, as Gary mentioned, flattened in a way: we are getting flattened. Can we do our jobs as historians in this climate?

BRUNDAGE: Can I just jump back to the question you posed just before this one? I think we need to avoid accepting the terms of the slippery-slope argument. We need to put the onus, so to speak, on those who insist that we maintain the landscape as it is. My argument is that the American commemorative landscape is 150 years old, more or less. It’s a very recent creation. There were few monuments erected during the first half of the nineteenth century. Not until the late nineteenth century did Americans begin erecting lots of monuments. As Americans, we should ask ourselves why any monument is sacred. Admittedly, the Lincoln Memorial, I would say, is sacred; nobody is going to touch that one. But obscure monuments in small towns? If people want to remove them: fine.

PAINTER: But there are the Sons of Confederacy people. That’s their monument.

BRUNDAGE: Fine, and if they want to keep it …

PAINTER: And they do sometimes.

BRUNDAGE: But my point is the conversation should be about why we should keep any monument. What is the monument’s cultural function at this moment in time? Is it advancing the identity we want for our community? Is it teaching the community what we want to have taught? Does it represent the values we embrace at this moment in time? Just because we inherited a monument doesn’t mean we have to keep it. There is no obligation for us to preserve every monument we’ve inherited. In fact, we don’t do it anyway. We don’t do it now.

CLINTON: We as historians, usually are pretty sacred about destroying evidence …

BRUNDAGE: I’m not talking about destroying them. Public space is a valued commodity, and we, as a society, should have the choice to alter our public space, especially our most important civic spaces, to reflect who we are at any given moment. Of course, we should make any changes with a deliberate process. We should do it democratically, inclusively. But the onus should be on defenders of the current landscape to explain why the landscape we have now is the landscape we should have in fifty years, one hunded years. Let’s not start with this assumption that the landscape we have now needs to be preserved as it is.

GALLAGHER: I agree with that. The process should decide whether you keep it or not. But if some group decided they’re going to keep one of these, I still think it’s important, then, to balance it with something else.

CLINTON: Beyond contexts? You need to understand when this memorial was built and why it was built. You do the tour that contextualizes it. But if it’s standing there “lest we forget”—the meaning of these monuments is not always as vague. We had a group of German students who came in to talk at Trinity University in San Antonio, and they were talking about their memorials and monuments, and they were just so astonished: “Well if these memorials don’t suit the current taste, then take them down.” I mean, they were very matter of fact. One could counter, “Really? You look at the art and label it ‘degenerate’ and just take it down?” So, I’m trying to clarify—who commissions? Who determines? You were talking about democratic process: what is that?

[Laughter]

CLINTON: Majority rules?

BRUNDAGE: Whatever community, the community itself should decide. And I think, as a historian, I would feel obligated to defend the right of that community if it decides to keep the monument up. But then I also will feel obliged to encourage them to interpret the monument broadly, fully, with complexity.

GALLAGHER: And maybe add another monument that would bring some other part of this historic story to people.

CLINTON: So what is the need for monuments?

[Laughter]

GALLAGHER: Do we have fifteen seconds to answer?

[Laughter]

COX: I think it’s to make the generation of people who put it there feel something. It’s about them. It’s …

CLINTON: Beyond funerary?

COX: Yeah.

PAINTER: I think it’s about identity. I think it’s related to people who want to obtain their DNAS so they can get their little genetic ancestry pie chart and feel like there is culture in their dna. You know, Americans are such mongrels—hungry for clarification.

CLINTON: Within a twenty-first-century focus, no?

PAINTER: Yes, a sense of who am I? And who are we? And when I say “we” here, I mean just those right around us, you know, in our town, or in our county, or whoever is the group we want to identity with and make our rules.

CLINTON: Our community.

PAINTER: No, our polity, in a sense, whoever would make these decisions. And so it’s real hard because in the towns you’re talking about, there’s a real controversy over who “we” is. But who are “we” in terms of governance? Who decides? But also, who “we” are in the sense of how history packs into our bodies and gives meaning to our bodies in a time and in a place. Can this be read backwards to give us an identity? Because we move around so much, you know, our kids are everywhere; our grandchildren are all mixed up. Who are we? For some, “Well, we have always been Confederates,” or, “We have always been the children of slaves.” For that matter, this kind of teleological thinking, of reading, our identity backwards, this happens to nonwhite people as well. I mean, think about black power. You would think that all African Americans had just gotten off the boat and are pure African in culture and in body, and there’s no mixed-up Irish and German and Jewish and all the other stuff that goes into so many bodies of color. We are a mixed-up people, and I think this is a way of trying to make meaning, to clarify meaning in identity.

CLINTON: So recently, for example, a memorial was removed from the grounds of this Speed Art Museum, which is at the University of Louisville, and what happened to the memorial? Harrodsburg, Kentucky, took it. They moved it to another community. So on this question of removal, I think most of the removal movement is not dedicated to the principle of putting it in communities that are more conformable with it. But it is being removed because of the concept that it either triggers something offensive or is itself offensive. I think this is a larger debate: do you keep things within the landscape that make people uncomfortable?

COX: I’m willing to say, you know, particularly on the grounds of courthouses where citizens engage with their government or citizens have to go in, to be put on trial or whatever, that’s very problematic.

CLINTON: So particular public space or all public space?

COX: No, no, on the grounds of courthouses or government property where citizens engage their government, whether it’s local or state.

CLINTON: Okay, so if the government removes these symbolic impediments to justice or fairness or equality, then isn’t the government being let off pretty easily in terms of its responsibilities?

PAINTER: No, because it’s hard to do that.

CLINTON: It’s hard to do that?

PAINTER: Even when the county or city council agrees, they do it in the dark of night … It’s hard.

[All speaking at once]

COX: We have gotten to a place where states like North Carolina, Tennessee … what are the other ones, Georgia, Alabama …

BRUNDAGE: North Carolina.

COX: They have passed laws to prevent any removal. What they’ve done is taken away local control, which is kind of an ironic thing. Taking away the local control so they can’t do anything, and they …

CLINTON: So with fracking—-so it goes with statues …

GALLAGHER: A counterargument to that is …

COX: I like counterarguments.

GALLAGHER: It’s fun to argue different sides, but history is full of very unpleasant hard edges. And the idea that you can create spaces where no one will feel uneasy about anything is difficult to imagine—a landscape where no one is going to be upset about anything? In some instances I think you should have to confront unpleasant things about the past and deal with them. And that’s another way in which I think these monuments can actually be useful. I think it is important where they are.

COX: Yeah.

GALLAGHER: The problem with the Confederate ones is that so many are right where you are talking about. They are right in front of the courthouses.

CLINTON: So if we put them in museums? Or would you put them in cemeteries?

COX: They are so huge. Some of them you can’t put them in a museum!

GALLAGHER: The monuments in front on the capitol grounds in Texas, you’d have to be like the Air and Space Museum to have that.

CLINTON: Don’t give Texans that challenge.

[Laughter]

GALLAGHER: I mean they are huge!

CLINTON: Fitz, when you were at the American Historical Association and we had a forum on this topic … were you the one who suggested the …

BRUNDAGE: The museum of white supremacy.

CLINTON: The museum of white supremacy.

BRUNDAGE: At Stone Mountain …

CLINTON: Or have a graveyard for …

[Laughter]

COX: Here’s why it couldn’t work—because the people, local communities, feel like they own them: that’s mine. So these ideas of the parks where you can bring in …

CLINTON: We can segue into the fact that there are “memorial gardens” in Europe. I’m interested, again, in broadening the debate.

GALLAGHER: I was in a meeting with the National Park Service historians. Some people are saying: “Put the Confederate monuments in National Park sites. That’s where they belong. Take them and put them on a battlefield.” And the nps response to that, and I agree with this, is, Why would you? They have nothing to do with a national battlefield. The reason they were put up, why they were put up may have nothing to do with that. Why does it make sense to put them on a national battlefield?

CLINTON: So he was in battle, and therefore, go put him on that battlefield. Fine.

[All speaking at once]

CLINTON: I’m just saying the basis for a statue is connected to the Civil War. Back to my initial issue: I’m struck by these memorials to war dead in individual states. For example, I see these beautiful funereal ones, and it’s “tear that down” if it’s to the Confederacy. We talked earlier about plaquing and contextualizing. If you give people the notion that, as Nell said, you want to remove it and put up the plaque explaining it, I’m just asking is there any advocacy for keeping the statues?

PAINTER: Sure.

CLINTON: And putting up a plaque? Do we have local commissions?

[All talking at once]

COX: That’s why it’s got to be a community’s decision.

PAINTER: Yes.

GALLAGHER: I agree.

CLINTON: If the “community” decides … but aren’t we dealing with local, state, as well as federal government?

PAINTER: Go vote.

GALLAGHER: In Charlottesville, the monument in front of the courthouse isn’t actually in Charlottesville; it’s in the county. So when the Charlottesville council discussed Lee and Jackson, they couldn’t even talk about the one in front of the courthouse, even though it’s only one hundred yards from the Stonewall Jackson equestrian statue. It’s in a different …

PAINTER: Jurisdiction.

CLINTON: Well, mentioning Charlottesville and what went on there: a lot of the press reported that these rallies were local. I was there for earlier rallies, an earlier rendition. These were “outside people,” and the idea they were mainly local was pretty ridiculous.

GALLAGHER: They weren’t local. They came in from all over the place.

CLINTON: So you get invaded. You get invaded. The Battle of Bull Run Commemoration this year [2017] was cancelled because the police anticipated an invasion during a political rally scheduled to coincide with the [commemoration] … I believe in going and reinterpreting the Civil War but not under actual battle conditions. And we are all being put on guard that way. And you talked earlier about the tearing down of statues versus the removal of a statue. How do we deal with that now?

PAINTER: Well, I think we are not the people who make that decision. We are talking here, yes. This is the same week as the Virginia elections which made such a potent … I was going to say symbol, but it’s not a symbol; it’s a changing of power. When I said go vote … that is the answer to the question of what to do. Change. If the people in power are saying the wrong things or doing the wrong things, then vote them out. And I think that is going to be the answer to the kinds of decisions starting on the local level.

GALLAGHER: But the state law that Karen mentioned, that we’ve all mentioned—in Virginia—that’s a state law passed by the legislators …

PAINTER: Yes, change the legislators.

GALLAGHER: Yes, they can change that law as well.

PAINTER: Yes.

COX: As gerrymandered as we are, I don’t think we’ll get …

CLINTON: I don’t mean to cut this off, but I would at least like to shift, in the time we have left, to broadening this to talk more generally about memorials. If we look abroad and look at the way in which Europe, Africa, and Asia memorializes—we are in the middle of this great debate over Confederate memorials—but I’m very struck when in my “American Icons” class, we find complex situations. People regularly assault memorials. A Gandhi statue goes down in Ghana this year [2017]. You have debates across the world over colonial issues. There was a miniature Statue of Liberty put up in Hanoi before colonial wars of liberation—now gone! So you look at the way in which we are in a worldwide dilemma. How does the artistic community respond to the questions of memorial destruction, statue removal? In Europe, it was an artist who proposed raising stones on sidewalks or streets and on these stones putting the names of those who were removed, who were deported, who died during the Holocaust so that you are forced to encounter this historical landscape in your everyday life. Certainly, that has been proposed in terms of slavery memorials. I mean, twenty years ago, Toni Morrison said, “There is not a bench by the road, a tree scored, that really looks at this question of slavery.” We now have a wonderful African American museum of history and culture in Washington, D.C. But we still are looking and talking about the historical landscape and memorials. African American soldier memorials is something you brought up, Gary, and I’ve seen them go up in towns where they have their Confederate and their Union memorials—a kind of stone or marble or bronze addendum.

GALLAGHER: They went up because of the kind of resurgence Fitz was talking about. I think they are a wonderful example of how popular culture can have an effect. The film Glory²⁰ had an enormous impact.

CLINTON: An African American soldier memorial was built in Washington, D.C.

GALLAGHER: Yes, I don’t think that would’ve been built had Glory not come out. I really don’t think it would have. And there’s a monument to USCT men on the national battlefield at Petersburg. It went up in 1991, right after Glory came out.—it hadn’t been there before—right where the USCT men fought. It’s a very interesting kind of parallel. There’s a statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback at Antietam that some private person put up. It’s behind the Union lines—that really is kind of comical. The battle … it’s really interesting how it continues to play out.

CLINTON: Memory battles abound, certainly the establishment of the Vietnam War Memorial and countermemorials put up or additional memorials. We can look at the way in which the recent debate over memorials to comfort women unfolded. There are quite a number of comfort women statues in the U.S., as well as in Korea.

GALLAGHER: My daughter-in-law is Japanese, and the history she got for World War II as a young woman—she’s forty-six now—dealt with World War II by not dealing with World War II. They just kind of skip it, and then it’s Hiroshima.

CLINTON: Most prominently, Germany and its history! They have really reformed their landscape.

PAINTER: Germany needed to reform the landscape in physical terms, but the theoretical underpinning comes from a historian named Pierre Nora in France. The French were talking about history and memory. What I’m hearing around this table is maybe the importance of what historians can do. What we’re doing here can bring about other memorials. I’m not talking about other memorials in other parts of the world but other memorials here in the U.S. Part of the discussion of Confederate memorials includes the erection of the colored soldiers’ memorials and so forth—or that plantation the New York Times wrote about …

COX: The Whitney Plantation.

CLINTON: Yes, which features a wall listing names of enslaved who came in by boat from the database done by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. It’s so powerful to see scholarship etched in stone.

PAINTER: I would say for me the importance coming out of this conversation is the need to broaden the conversation beyond Confederate memorials into memorials generally. How do we remember, say, the era of slavery in the Civil War and include all these other things as well so that we know that there are many alternatives?

BRUNDAGE: And I think another example is the truly fascinating debate going on in New York City about the J. Marion Sims monument right now. Sims was the “father of American gynecology.”

PAINTER: Oh right, right.

BRUNDAGE: I think it’s a very interesting conversation because of who is participating, especially feminists and women of color. What the monument is about—a medical pioneer who did some of his invasive medical research on enslaved and immigrant women—and how the monument is interpreted: is it a monument to a callous, bigoted surgeon who exploited powerless women or to a medical pioneer whose work improved the likelihood of women surviving childbirth? The question of what do you do with a historical figure whose contributions may be quite profound and yet deeply tainted.

GALLAGHER: Deeply tainted.

BRUNDAGE: So that’s a classic instance where a monument is so much more than a simple monument to a historical figure and, instead, is a monument that invokes complex historical questions regarding misogyny, racism, bigotry, medical innovation, the scientific method of experimentation, etc., etc. We can hope that New York City is going to have a very thoughtful debate about how to deal with that monument.

CLINTON: I’m thinking also of the recent debate whereby the memorial which includes Albert Richard Parsons—a Haymarket victim who was hanged—has been under scrutiny. We look at his radicalism and look in Texas where he was advocating for the rights of emancipated slaves. Yet Parsons fought for the Confederacy as a young man. So therefore, we have a conundrum. Where do we draw the lines?

PAINTER: We’re drawing the lines.

CLINTON: Well, the lines are being drawn all the time.

PAINTER: Let other people draw them. We don’t have to.

[Laughter]

GALLAGHER: Well, the point Nell made is so hard to get students to understand, to really understand, the difference between history and memory.

COX: Oh yeah.

GALLAGHER: And these debates are some of the best tools we have to do that, to get them to understand historical complexity. This or that? Black or white? Which one is it? These kinds of things are very useful in conveying complexity, and the difference between history and memory.

CLINTON: So these contested moments can be some of the best examples. But we are also seeing outbreaks of violence and outbreaks of distortions of histories in the headlines in a way that is not just confusing our students but confounding public policy. I mean historians are so relevant and yet simultaneously history is being …

COX: It seems like everybody is a historian, you know. I supported the women petitioners in Charlestown by writing to the head of the commission and answered all those questions: Is this erasing history? Is this a “slippery slope”? And I documented everything, and the chair’s response was that what I said was idiotic. He quoted President Trump about the monuments. So it’s as if they don’t even care. But somehow they are better historians and know better than anybody else.

GALLAGHER: Well, they have access to the Internet, and they’ll say, “But I saw …” I was supposed to testify for fifteen minutes before the Charlottesville Commission—which was a well-put-together commission and very thoughtful—and ended up staying there two hours talking about all the things you just mentioned, Karen. Okay, what about this, what about that? And afterward, two of them came up, and I know I was talking and they were there, but they knew what they knew before I started to talk. And they still knew it when the discussion was over. It’s because they have their sources, and their sources are just like ours because they saw it somewhere online. You can actually believe there were fifty thousand black Confederates soldiers involved if you look at certain things online. And you can even cite stuff, so it must be real.

BRUNDAGE: For all our talk about how historians have really transformed the understanding of the Civil War and slavery—which is absolutely true—we have to remember General [Michael] Kelly [White House chief of staff for Donald Trump in 2017] perhaps spoke for a generation when he made his comment that the Civil War could have been avoided if American politicians had just compromised. He probably read historians such as Roy F. Nichols and Avery Craven,²¹ who saw the Civil War as the tragic result of northern abolitionist extremists and southern secessionist extremists tearing the nation apart.

GALLAGHER: And James G. Randall, that’s where he got his Civil War.²²

BRUNDAGE: The history Kelly probably learned … he was not misrepresenting what he had learned in school, but he apparently hasn’t learned anything since.

GALLAGHER: He hadn’t been reading since then.

BRUNDAGE: Exactly.

CLINTON: I may have been overstating it, but the notion that the war was about states’ rights and not about slavery is something that continues to be debated, for example, in Texas schoolbooks.

COX: That’s the interesting thing because I read something recently about this. We have a challenge because we can provide all this information as historians to them, but they believe what they want to believe. You can’t change that.

PAINTER: You can vote and change the officeholders.

COX: I mean in terms of educating people, if they don’t want to be educated—they decide, you know … It goes back to your point about identity. There is this feeling that removing monuments is removing something about who they are, something important because of their heritage, that they’re important because of that genealogy, and they think that’s what your destroying.

CLINTON: Is heritage divorced from history?

GALLAGHER: If they could see that slavery was really central to the coming of the Civil War, then somehow all of their heritage is tainted. All their ancestors are all monsters.

COX: Exactly.

GALLAGHER: So you’re asking them basically to cut themselves loose from everybody in their past and agree that their past was awful.

COX: Yeah.

GALLAGHER: And that their people were awful.

COX: And that’s what where we run up against a brick wall.

GALLAGHER: It’s hard to get past that.

PAINTER: Vote them out.

COX: No, we are talking about just the regular folks.

PAINTER: No, that is the reality of the situation we are in, in a sharply divided country in which roughly 38–40 percent of people are, to use a shorthand, Trumpists. They are going to stay there. And the only way to change that … I mean you are not going to change their views. You have to change who represents them. And in situations where the majority are people who think like this, then there are other ways, when talking about maybe putting up a plaque next to or in addition to a monument or creating other ways of dealing with it. But fundamentally, we still live, God willing, in a democracy. If a question is fundamentally important, you change the answer by changing the officeholders.

GALLAGHER: And the question can always come up again and … I mean it’s not forever when we decide something.

PAINTER: Yes.

BRUNDAGE: We mentioned popular culture previously. I’ll use a musical example here. I don’t want to exaggerate my optimism here, but on the other hand, I do think that there are generations of white southerners who are less invested in “southernness.” We can see it manifest in popular culture in the “bro-country” of the last fifteen years. Brad Paisley [a West Virginia country-and-western singer] is a good example. He and some of the other country musicians are young, white men trying to navigate a world in which they’re not adopting the hardline racial identities of the past. They are trying to navigate a world where they listen to hip-hop; they have black friends and move in a more biracial society than perhaps many before them did. They are trying to navigate a different way to a white southern identity. They may talk about the Confederate flag and things Confederate, but they are not anchoring their identity in that version of the South. There is a real possibility to have conversations about heritage with younger white southerners that may not be as fraught as such a conversation would have been in the past. Of course, there are going to be the white nationalists who show up in Charlottesville. There are going to be younger members of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, but I don’t think that the demographics are necessarily pointing to the perpetuation of neo-Confederates.

GALLAGHER: Even in Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, they took down the Confederate flag …

COX: They took that down?

GALLAGHER: It’s gone. The Confederate’s Veterans paid for the balcony there, and it was displayed across it, and then [it] went down this summer.

BRUNDAGE: Yeah, they won’t publicize it. The CMA [Country Music Association] Awards are not going to have people denouncing the Confederacy. On the other hand, denouncers are going to anyways.

GALLAGHER: And they are.

CLINTON: And through popular culture, with movies having an influence and music having an influence, things change. When I first encountered a “South Shall Rise Again” T-shirt in my San Antonio classroom, I was alarmed—until I realized the slogan was above the Mexican flag! Context please!

BRUNDAGE: Right.

COX: I do want to point out something I saw in Charlotte, which was … I went to a Charlotte pride event and, you know, downtown …

CLINTON: A gay pride event.

COX: Yup, gay pride … and there was someone selling T-shirts that had the rainbow flag—but in the corner was the battle flag.

CLINTON: Of the Confederacy.

COX: Of the Confederacy. And then I’ll see people who are just walking around, you know, that are pretty conservative. I mean they are at the gay pride festival, and they are wearing a battle flag on the back of their shirt.

PAINTER: Yup. Two separate things.

GALLAGHER: People are complicated.

COX: They are complicated!

COX: But I do agree with what Fitz said. I think there is this younger generation not as invested as some people are.

CLINTON: We also said that twenty years ago … and you know, is it because we teach memory differently?

PAINTER: It’s a spiral, not a circle.

CLINTON: A spiral, not a circle.

PAINTER: So, where we were in the backlash, a post-Reagan backlash, is not the same as where we are in the post-Obama backlash. I mean it’s a hard way to get anywhere, but things do change.

GALLAGHER: This can’t go in the transcript, I’m sure, but Joan Waugh teaches at UCLA and teaches a Civil War class that had four hundred people in it. It was the second largest class in the department for years. And when she first proposed teaching it, they said, “Well, it doesn’t fit our demographics,” and they meant there are too many Asian American students at ucla. Some people wondered whether Asian American students would care about the American Civil War. Well, the class was huge, and she told them one time she had eight Robert Lees in her class one semester. None related to the general!

[Laughter]

GALLAGHER: I do think it’s changing. Of course, there’s still a pretty significant residue, a sort of throwback attitude toward a lot of this, but they are on the losing side of this in the long term.

BRUNDAGE: Another thing that has been very striking about what has happened in the last three or four months is that the historical professional has been showcased to a degree that I can’t remember in any other public controversy, showcased, if you will, to our great advantage.

GALLAGHER: They treat us as if they might actually want to hear what we have to say!

BRUNDAGE: Well, exactly. But if you think about the breadth of historians who participated in this conversation and the value added, I think the profession has definitely contributed. That, to me, is a surprising turn of events in the age of the internet …

CLINTON: But it is also the age of Twitter. It’s also the age of people having Twitter handles, people doing blogs. When I was first teaching abroad, I was made aware of that in an international situation; I was instructed to go on Facebook to recruit international students. You have to reach people across the globe and highlight America and American studies. So during the past decade the History News Network is upping our game. Many places are making us realize that we need to speak out. That’s why we have a new series called “History in the Headlines.” These headlines, by the way, are going to be shaped by media and the media calling on us. The media interacting with historians is a relatively new phenomenon. You cannot respond to a media inquiry by saying: “I’ll send you the manuscript of my next book.” They want the …

BRUNDAGE: But the profession has responded. There has been an engagement by the profession which, as you say, is different than it might have been. It’s not at the level it might have been during the Vietnam War era, but there is still a kind of engagement of academics …

CLINTON: What do you mean?

BRUNDAGE: Well, I mean, in a sense during the Vietnam War there was a level of some faculty being deeply, deeply engaged: teach-ins, etc., etc. It hasn’t been quite that.

GALLAGHER: It has been at the University of Virginia since August.

BRUNDAGE: Right, but it hasn’t been quite that level everywhere. Yet there is still a level of engagement—from what I sense—from the academy, which is very heartening.

CLINTON: Is it our responsibility as historians to always respond?

COX: It just depends. I mean, when I saw those guys in Charlottesville … something went off in me, like a switch. I was like, “I’ve got to write something.” I just, you know, almost felt like a little bit of dread when I was talking to the editor of the [New York] Times. I just fully expected him to reach out, but I first reached out to him, and he said, “Let’s just wait a day, just one day.”

PAINTER: Is this Clay Risen?

COX: Uhumm. And so, I did it [wrote the piece] almost with a heavy heart, but I felt like I had to do it.

PAINTER: Really?

COX: Yeah.

CLINTON: Well some of us may have heavy hearts in other ways.

PAINTER: If somebody asked me, because you never know … but when I get asked to write, I write.

CLINTON: What about you, Gary?

GALLAGHER: I have no idea how many people I got asked by to comment. I actually don’t trust most of the press, especially television, because they’re not really seriously engaged. They don’t really want to hear us. They really want us to say what they want us to say. And they want us to say that in forty-five seconds, and that’s what they’ll use! I just don’t trust them. And so I did a few interviews. I did one on NPR, one on PBS; I did a few things and wrote just a couple of pieces.

CLINTON: And Katie Couric?

GALLAGHER: I did two good hours with Katie Couric, which might yield six minutes … Anyway, not worth it with most of them.

COX: Well, I think … I hear what you are saying because I know that it seems like …

GALLAGHER: And your headlines are part of the problem, Karen, that we talked about.

COX: My headlines? They’re not “my” headlines.

GALLAGHER: No, no, you know what I mean. You write a thoughtful piece, and they slap a headline on it. And it’s only the headline that people remember.

COX: It’s true because I saw it repeated in foreign papers.

GALLAGHER: The headline?

COX: Just the headline! Which is not even what I said. But on the one hand, there were these really young production assistants calling me and asking, “Would you, like, give me a history of the United Daughters of the Confederacy?” And I spent years writing that book …

PAINTER: Yeah, but now you have an elevator speech on the Daughters of the Confederacy.

COX: But then …

GALLAGHER: They want the “this is my dissertation topic speech.”

PAINTER: But you can do that. We have to do that.

CLINTON: So we are training a new generation of historians to do this?

COX: No. But I want to say there are online magazines like Vice and Vox and Mic that are reaching younger generations of people, and they wanted to know about it. I thought that was important to talk to them. And it was really well done, and it reaches thousands of millennials.

PAINTER: Teen Vogue.

COX: Yeah, anything.

CLINTON: Well, Karen, besides the headaches with headlines, you’ve talked about some of the follow-up that you get that doesn’t encourage us to write …

GALLAGHER: I have a neo-Confederate hate mail file this thick [gestures a large gap] that I get from people.

COX: I save my hate email.

CLINTON: Well, won’t it be a good archive?

BRUNDAGE: I got hate mail from, I’ll call him an anarchist, an antifa [militant leftist] because [of] the fact that I had created a site for inventory of monuments. It is like, “Tear them all down,” and I won’t use the language they used but, “Tear them all down and you are going to go rot in hell with them.” So it’s like “Hey, I just count them, I didn’t put them up.”

CLINTON: We historians don’t we tend to pick our subjects? They don’t pick us. So just on a final note, can we go around and have each of you maybe give a comment on history and memory—something which has come up a lot in 2017? What would you each like to leave us with?

BRUNDAGE: We are in a debate not just in the American South but also in the United States as a whole. And I think it’s so welcome that we have a debate that extends literally from Hawaii to Maine and, to a certain extent, far beyond Confederate monuments. It should be monumental—concerning our commemorative identity and our commemorative landscape. We should pursue history and memory as a kind of national reflection about our landscape. I would actually say Mayor Mitch Landrieu and New Orleans should be our model as to how to have that conversation. So in that regard, I would say it’s tragic if what happened in Charlottesville does not allow a wider discussion. But if we do have a wider discussion, it will be a welcome moment for American history.

PAINTER: I have some things I wanted to say …

CLINTON: Please. …

PAINTER: One thing I would love for us to be able to do is broadcast the three words “history and memory”—just to get people to understand that such concepts exist. It’s crucially important. The second thing is that when we talk about history and memory, we need to talk about monuments related to the Confederacy, such as to the colored soldiers, so that it’s not only about tearing down, and not only about Confederate monuments, but about related history and memory in the Civil War. That’s the second thing. And the last thing, you started to ask about training graduate students and how professional historians should respond in this kind of climate. I would say, first of all, we have to do good, professional scholarly training. We expect our postgraduates to become academic historians. They have to have good scholarly bona fides. But in addition to their scholarly bona fides, they need an elevator speech about what they do and why it’s important. They need to have at least two registers and probably three. Because the central register is talking to the [New York] Times, or talking to the [Washington] Post, in which you get 700 words—not just 50 or 250. So, think about the part that is 40,000 words. Think about the part that is 800 words, and think of the part that is 50 to 100 words.

CLINTON: And think about the Tweet.

PAINTER: 140 characters.

CLINTON: There you go.

GALLAGHER: I think this is a reminder, and I’ll just follow up on what Fitz said. If all we do is talk to each other, it’s a great way to make a living and we all love it. But in the end, we really do need to make an effort to bring or share the best of what our research and work yields. We can try to reach a broader audience because if we don’t, it’s really too much inside baseball, or remaining in our little treehouses—however you want to put it. It has to be more than just reaching only our own students. And in my lifetime, there have only been one or two opportunities equal to this one, where we are able to extend our reach. And in our field, we have an advantage that almost no other field in history has. In American history a Civil War remains so rich with opportunities, because so many of the issues from the war resonate now. They come straight down through the decades, and we are still talking about them.

COX: I just want to add that I think these kinds of events provided such a wonderful opportunity, for me, as a historian, to engage in this public conversation. It’s important to see other historians engage and we don’t always have to engage by writing op-eds for the New York Times or Washington Post. We can do it, though, at the local level and write for the local paper or our state paper about these issues. And I hope—-and I’m hopeful—that we’ll use this moment. People are paying attention to this moment, and historians must use it to continue to influence decisions about other subjects—not just Confederate monuments. Whether it’s mass incarceration or …

CLINTON: Sexual harassment …

COX: Yes! Exactly! Other issues of the day!

CLINTON: And I wanted to finish …

BRUNDAGE: Can I add one final thought?

CLINTON: Indeed.

BRUNDAGE: Well, I think this moment is so tied to the moment of Trump in so many different ways. In the last eight years, history enrollments at universities have declined across the country according to evidence gathered by the American Historical Association [AHA]. But I know from what Jim Grossman [executive director of the AHA] has said: history enrollments actually went up in the last year. I think there is a hunger, a history hunger. History happened last year in a way that surprised all of us. There is a kind of hunger to understand what just happened. In its own way, I think this event fits into that issue as well … I’m not just saluting us as historians for having done a good job of engaging the pubic, but we have also been demonstrating the enduring value of history as a discipline. So, this is a moment when we are on display, and I think we have acquitted ourselves well. It is very important for us as a discipline going forward.

CLINTON: Well, I wanted to conclude by saying Jim Downs and I invited the four of you because you’ve been very disciplined at today’s session—and also undisciplined enough to give so generously of your time to help us launch this project. We appreciate each of you for taking from your busy schedules because each of you has really been engaged in such a variety of projects. Nell, with your art and your forthcoming memoir [Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over]. And Gary, wherever I go and whatever I’m doing, you’ve been there first leading the tours, leading the charges, a champion of the National Park Service, a force with which to be reckoned at the Nau Center at uva, among other important initiatives. Fitz, you’ve really been marvelous, by showing us the way in which a project can actually change our views of when the memorials developed and how historical exploration of the landscape and excavation of the archives can reframe our arguments. Karen is out there with her blog [https://southinpopculture.com/] and books. So, this volume will, I hope, give us a lot to think about and inspire others.

PAINTER: And I hope it will have a Facebook page.

CLINTON: Surely, you jest.

PAINTER: No.

CLINTON: No, I’m saying, of course.

[Laughter]

CLINTON: And I think we will have some have wonderful photos, and eventually podcasts, so it’s been wonderful, a great morning, and thank you for everything. Thank you all so very much. See you in the headlines!

1    The career of Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, born to a prominent Maryland family in 1816, pendulumed between military service, including a stint during the Mexican-American War, and civil engineering, building railroads in the United States and Panama. After Kentucky, his home since 1852, declared neutrality after the start of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate Army in Tennessee, commissioned as a colonel, and was later promoted to brigadier general. He surrendered to Union forces at Fort Henry, Tennessee, where he was taken prisoner, then later released in a prisoner exchange. He resumed his command during the Vicksburg Campaign of 1863 and was killed in a battle at Champion Hill, Hinds County, Mississippi, on May 16, 1863.

2    Given to the university in 1909 and placed in 1913, Silent Sam’s inscriptions read, “Erected under the auspices of the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, aided by the alumni of the University,” and “To the sons of the University who entered the war of 1861–65, in answer to the call of their country and whose lives taught the lesson of their great commander that duty is the sublimest word in the English language.” Sam is silent because he carries no ammunition and cannot fire his gun.

3    The Pennsylvania Zouave uniform, worn most notably by the 114th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment, led by Charles H. T. Collis, who dubbed his initial company “Zouaves d’Afrique,” consisted of red baggy pants, a dark blue collarless jacket with red Arabesque ornamental trim, a light blue sash, and white gaiters, and was worn alternately with a red fez or white turban. It emulated the uniform of the French light infantry first used in the French colonization of North Africa and made popular during the Crimean War. Although the uniform varied in color and detail, Zouave-clad military units fought on both sides of the American Civil War from more than thirty states but the uniform was most popular in New York and Pennsylvania.

4    The Confederate Memorial sits in Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, and is titled “New South” by its designer, the noted Jewish American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, who fought for the Confederacy as a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute and is buried at the foot of its granite base. Unveiled in 1914, the thirty-two-foot-high bronze memorial was commissioned by the Arlington Confederate Memorial Association, which was led largely by members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the United Confederate Veterans.

5    Alexander Hamilton Stephens (1812–83), vice president of the Confederate States, later member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia and afterward governor of Georgia, gave the famous Cornerstone Speech, which defended slavery and praised white supremacy, a few weeks before the start of the Civil War.

6    The Jefferson Davis State Historical Site was established near Davis’s birthplace in Fairview, Kentucky. The monument is the tallest unreinforced concrete structure in the world. Completed in 1924, it is the second tallest obelisk in the world after the Washington Monument.

7    Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial is a rockface carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson that covers about three acres and is about four hundred feet above the ground. It was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1915 and originally designed by Gutzon Borglum. Work on the project frequently stalled until it was redesigned and completed by Roy Faulkner in 1970.

8    A white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally to protest the removal of Confederate statues and a counterprotest in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, turned into mob violence, which led to dozens injured and the death of thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, when a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotestors.

9    The Travis Park Confederate Monument was designed gratis by artist Virginia Montgomery of New Orleans. Her father served as a captain in the Confederate army, and her mother, who lived in San Antonio in the 1890s, was a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and reportedly suggested a statue of a common soldier, not a general.

10  Elisabet Ney, sculptor, born 1833 in Westphalia, Germany, educated in Munich, sculpted intellectual and political leaders throughout Europe until her marriage in 1863. After immigrating to the United States in 1871, her husband purchased a former plantation in Texas that she managed until 1892, when she opened an art studio in Austin, Texas, where she completed busts of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, both housed in the state capitol, and the recumbent sculpture of Johnston, laid in 1905 over his grave in the state cemetery in Austin.

11  Albert Sidney Johnston, born in 1803 in Kentucky, owned a Texas plantation; served the Republic of Texas as adjutant general and secretary of war; the Texas army as a brigadier general; and after Texas’s annexation, the U.S. Army as a colonel during the Mexican-American War. In 1861, he resigned his U.S. Army commission to take command of the Western Department as a general in the Confederate army until his death at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.

12  In July 1863, Elizabeth Thorn, mother of three and caretaker of the Gettysburg cemetery after her husband joined in the U.S. Army, buried 105 soldiers from the Battle of Gettysburg, with intermittent help, while six months pregnant. A seven-foot bronze statue of her, weary and pregnant, was created by Ron Tunison and dedicated in November 2002.

13  Mary Virginia “Jennie” Wade, also referred to as Ginnie, was the only civilian to die as a direct result of combat during the Battle of Gettysburg. After several bullets and an artillery shell struck her sister’s home during the first two days of battle, the twenty-year-old white woman was struck by a stray bullet while baking bread or biscuits in the kitchen on July 3, 1863. A statue was placed on her grave in Evergreen cemetery in Gettysburg in 1900, and a statue of her, completed in 1984, sits in front of the home, now a museum, where she was killed.

14  Virginians claim the first Thanksgiving was held at Berkeley Plantation in December 1619, and only after the Civil War could New England insist the holiday was a Yankee invention, which was associated with Abraham Lincoln, as he was the first president (since George Washington) to proclaim a national Thanksgiving feast.

15  George B. McClellan served as commander of the Army of the Potomac and general in chief in 1861 and 1862, until President Abraham Lincoln relieved him of duty, citing McClellan’s unresponsiveness. In 1864, he ran as the Democratic presidential nominee against Lincoln and was defeated.

16  The statue of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in Manassas, Virginia, was designed by Italian-born sculptor Joseph Pollia and unveiled at its dedication on August 31, 1940.

17  The obelisk, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was dedicated in 1868 to soldiers who fought for the Union and in the Indian wars in New Mexico. The monument faced its own controversy over one inscription on its base that referred to “savage Indians.” Someone chiseled away the adjective; it was never repaired.

18  Stolpersteine are the stumbling stones placed around Germany and other countries where Nazis committed atrocities. The act of missing ones’ footing, hence stumbling, reminds people of what awful things occurred at these particular places.

19  Kara Walker, an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist, and filmmaker, explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work.

20  Glory, an American feature film starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Matthew Broderick, released in 1989, told the story of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a regiment made up of free and formerly enslaved African Americans and white officers.

21  Roy F. Nichols (1896–1973), author of The Stakes of Power, 1845–1877, among other prominent U.S. histories, retired from the University of Pennsylvania. Avery Craven (1885–1980), scholar of the American South and author of The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861, served on the faculty of the University of Chicago.

22  James G. Randall (1881–1953) was the author of The Civil War and Reconstruction (1937), which became a classic undergraduate textbook.