Departments

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Lost Cause

  • SOURCE: Commonweal
    5/7/2023

    Engaging Toxic Nostalgia on Confederate Memorial Day

    by Richard Brown

    "For those of us who have a visceral objection to Confederate Memorial Day—who are appalled at not only commemorating but celebrating an economic and social system that oppressed a race for over two centuries—how should we engage a worldview that doesn’t see the harm of such celebrations, or that embraces the mythology of the Lost Cause?"

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    1/25/2023

    Florida's AP Fight Latest Battle in a Very Old Education War

    by Bethany Bell

    The state's rejection of the proposed curriculum as "indoctrination" stands on the foundation laid by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to establish the Lost Cause myth as the center of history education in the South for generations. 

  • SOURCE: Substack
    1/18/2023

    Bemoaning Alabama's King-Lee Holiday Misses a Bigger Point

    by Kevin M. Levin

    While white Alabama still embraces the "lost cause" mythology embodied by Robert E. Lee, outrage about the holiday he shares with Martin Luther King, Jr. shouldn't blind the public to the ongoing struggle to change the commemorative landscape—in Montgomery and nationwide. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    12/11/2022

    The Lost Cause is Alive and Well in Textbooks for JROTC Programs

    Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps texts offer information on a wide variety of subjects, including military history, without the kind of oversight that mainstream textbooks receive. The result is a curriculum shot through with right-wing ideology and historical myth. 

  • SOURCE: The Guardian
    9/5/2022

    Ty Seidule: Confederates Were Traitors

    The naming of military facilties for Confederates was not a project of post-Civil War reconciliation; it was about valorizing and defending segregation in the 20th century, as with 

  • SOURCE: New Statesman
    8/17/2022

    Sarah Churchwell on the Lies of "Gone With the Wind"

    by Adam Hochshild

    Does a 500 page book on the historical distortions of the novel and film seem like beating a dead horse? What if the horse is still alive and threatening to trample people? 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    5/23/2022

    Facing the Truth in the Land of Lee

    by Laura Brodie

    The controversy over removing Robert E. Lee's portrait from diplomas at Washington and Lee University points to an uncomfortable truth: Lee's historical depiction as handsome has been a visual symbol of the Lost Cause that has contributed to acceptance of the pro-Confederate mythology. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    1/23/2022

    Confederate Groups are Keeping the Lost Cause Myth on Life Support

    by Erin L. Thompson

    "Confederate heritage" groups have used their financial resources to bring lawsuits before sympathetic judges to thwart the public's desire to remove monuments to the white supremacist pro-slavery government in public spaces. 

  • SOURCE: AL.com
    1/12/2022

    Alabama's Capitol is a Crime Scene, with a 120 Year Coverup

    The Alabama Capitol in Montgomery was the first seat of the Confederate government and the place where white Democrats ratified a Jim Crow constitution in 1901. You'd learn little of this by touring the museum-like building. 

  • SOURCE: New York Magazine
    12/14/2021

    The Right's 1877 Project

    Helen Andrews's recent "American Conservative" column revives the myths that Reconstruction was a "tragic era" and that Black disenfranchisement was a force for progress, troubling indicators of the current right's views of democracy.