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

by Cynthia Mills, Cynthia Mills (Editor)

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. Ramussen – 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.

The Art Historian Cynthia Mills, a specialist in nineteenth-century public sculpture, is executive editor of American Art, the scholarly journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Pamela H. Simpson is the Ernest Williams II Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University. She is the coauthor of The Architecture of Historic Lexington.

Genres: History, Politics, Art History, American History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2003

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before the controversy over Confederate monuments that occupied the news in 2017 and culminated in the tragic events in Charlottesville, scholars were looking at the monuments and what they said about history, memory and American culture. This compendium of essays written in 2003 sets forth the issues this country confronted 14 years later. The book contains multiple essays that examine the ways Confederate memorials – from the statues on Monument Avenue to the huge carving on Stone Mountain – testify to the tenets of what southerners call the Lost Cause, a romanticized narrative of the war from the Southern viewpoint. Several essays highlight the leading role women’s groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy played in the memorialization--this was particularly interesting to me, as on one side of the family I had a great grandmother that was a member of the UDC. The authors trace the origins, objectives, and changing consequences of Confederate monuments over time and the dynamics of individuals and organizations that sponsored them. The authors were prescient in their discussions about monuments and their relevance today with the debates over Confederate monuments and their role in how the South’s past should be remembered.