Collective memory — what society chooses to remember, honor or erase from the past — is perpetually mediated. For generations, Confederate statues and monuments stood in public squares until a new racial reckoning compelled cities and towns to remove them. But that wasn’t the end of the story, at least not in Shenandoah County, Virginia. Its school board voted on May 9 to restore the names of Confederate Generals Lee, Jackson and Ashby to a pair of schools that had been renamed (Honey Run and Mountain View) in 2020.
In Tennessee, the caretakers of the Franklin Battlefield on May 13 dedicated a new monument honoring the Texas soldiers who fought there for the Confederacy in 1864. In this episode of History As It Happens, historian and Substack writer Kevin Levin discusses the grip Lost Cause mythology continues to hold on the minds of some Americans and the difficult task of acknowledging important historical events and actors without glorifying their causes.
“I don’t think this really has much to do with history,” said Mr. Levin, referring to the Shenandoah County decision. “I can’t imagine school board officials sitting in a back room having a serious debate about history. And unfortunately, a lot of the discussion about the Civil War era gets filtered through a political lens. This leaves very little room for serious historical discussion … and it really comes down to whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican.”
Mr. Levin said people must remember that Confederate statues, monuments and place names mostly did not originate in the years immediately after the Civil War. Rather, they were erected or named during the height of the Jim Crow era as symbols of white supremacy. Stonewall Jackson High School in Shenandoah County, for instance, was named in 1959 as part of the state’s “massive resistance” to court-ordered integration.
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