Past Is Prologue
A Historian Explains Why Confederate Statues Should Come Down
History studies the evolution of landscapes. Freezing them in time helps no one.
A couple of folks have recently asked me how, as a historian (I’m a librarian now, not a historian, but I have a master’s in U.S. history), I could be so very supportive of the removal of Confederate monuments from Monument Avenue here in Richmond, Virginia.
During the Civil War, Richmond served as the capital of the Confederate States of America. In the years and decades that followed the war, the city reconstructed the history, memory, and mythology of the South and the war it had fought a generation before. The most vivid manifestation of that effort was the creation of Monument Avenue, an internationally famous boulevard lined with the homes of Richmond’s elite and stocked from the 1890s to the 1920s with monumental sculptures of generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other figures of Confederate military history.
To be honest, it’s precisely because of my training in history that I’m okay with removing those sculptures. If my studies taught me anything, it’s that times and people and spaces change.
