The penultimate chapter on the Charleston shooting shows that this is not so much 'history' as it is current events. This book is quite recent, with the epilogue bringing the history of Confederate monuments into the 2020s. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals. 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.

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. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. These conflicts have raged for well over a century-but they've never been as intense as they are today. 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.

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground.

Karen cox no common ground