At the time of this review, Americans have defaced, reviled, and removed Confederate monuments. Confederate Civil War Memory—the Lost Cause—and its ties to white supremacy made these artifacts twenty-first-century targets of protests against racism and police brutality. Scholars have studied Civil War memory at length, but these two new books provide an extraordinarily valuable perspective on these objects at this unique juncture of history, memory, and current events. Maurantonio’s Confederate Exceptionalism examines contemporary manifestations of the Lost Cause, whereas Brown’s Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America assesses both United States and Confederate Civil War monument design in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although valuable separately, together these studies provide insight into how distinct disciplines approach the same controversial issue.
Maurantonio focuses on one epicenter of current Civil War memory struggles—Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. She argues that Monument Avenue represents “a three-dimensional setting for the display...