No Common Ground, Karen L. Cox
No Common Ground, Karen L. Cox
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No Common Ground
Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

Author: Karen L. Cox

Narrator: David Sadzin

Unabridged: 6 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/08/2021


Synopsis

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century—but they've never been as intense as they are today.

In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back.

About Karen L. Cox

Karen L. Cox is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is also the author of Dixie's Daughters, which won the Julia Cherry Spruill prize for the best book in southern women's history, and Dreaming of Dixie.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Gregory

This book is quite recent, with the epilogue bringing the history of Confederate monuments into the 2020s. The penultimate chapter on the Charleston shooting shows that this is not so much "history" as it is current events. If you are looking for a book to explain "everything going on" regarding rac......more

Goodreads review by Kenneth

This is an excellent book on the place that Confederate monuments have in our society and current events. The author begins the narrative with the history of the building of the monuments themselves. After the Civil War ended, the monument movement began. The prime movers of of this were in many cas......more

A really interesting book by an author who has an extensive portfolio on tourism in the south and the proponent of "Dixie" as a destination. In this book, Cox looks at the Lost Cause myth and its impact on the continuing construction of Confederate monuments and memorials 150+ years after the end of......more

Goodreads review by Dale

A Review of the Audiobook Published in 2021 by Tantor Audio. Read by David Sadzin. Duration: 6 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. At it's core, this book is a history of Confederate monuments and what they mean(t) to all of the people who live and work around them. These monuments are tied in with the "Lost C......more