Monuments To The Lost Cause : Women, Art, And The Landscapes Of Southern Memory

This richly illustrated collection of fourteen essays examines the ways in which Confederate memorials--from Monument Avenue to Stone Mountain--and the public rituals surrounding them testify to the tenets of the Lost Cause, a romanticized narrative of the war. Several essays highlight the creative leading role played by women's groups in memorialization, while others explore the alternative ways in which people outside white southern culture wrote their very different histories on the southern landscape. The authors--who include Richard Guy Wilson, Catherine W. Bishir, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and William M. S. Rasmussen--trace the origins, objectives, and changing consequences of Confederate monuments over time and the dynamics of individuals and organizations that sponsored them. Thus these essays extend the growing literature on the rhetoric of the Lost Cause by shifting the focus to the realm of the visual. They are especially relevant in the present day when Confederate symbols and monuments continue to play a central role in a public--and often emotionally charged--debate about how the South's past should be remembered.