Groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), provided white Southerners with reasons to take pride in their heritage and the motives of their ancestors in fighting the Civil War, for the defense of their beliefs and traditions, while ignoring racism and slavery.Ĭox argues that the importance of Confederate monuments is not limited to the groups which erected them or to those who espouse the “Lost Cause”, representing “Southern heritage”. She concludes that in all periods racism, white supremacy, and the Lost Cause myth were common to the narrative presents by these monuments. Cox (North Carolina) gives us a detailed, interesting account of the history of Civil War monuments from the postwar period through the era of Jim Crow and on into the 21st Century.Ĭox looks at how the rise of the “Lost Cause” ideology influences monuments and memorials across several distinct periods, the 1880’s -1900, the post-world war era, the 1950’s-1960’s and on to 2020. The author of the award winning Dixie’s Daughters, in No Common Ground, Prof. ISBN: 1469662671Ĭonfederate Memorialization and Racial Justice More than 200 members of the Black community perished in this fire in April 1940 and it is still the fourth deadliest club fire in the history of the United States.Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Her next project will examine the Rhythm Club fire in Natchez, Mississippi.

She has been interviewed by journalists from around the world for her expertise on Confederate monuments and Confederate culture more broadly. A public intellectual, she has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, CNN, Smithsonian Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post. She is also the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (2012). She is the author of Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (2003), which won the Southern Association for Women Historians' Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (2011), Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South (2017), and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (2021).

Cox is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she teaches courses in American history with a focus on southern history and culture.

No Common Ground by Karen L. Cox