Why Wiping out Monuments to the Confederacy May Not Be a Path to a More Inclusive Society

Consider the Costs of Destroying Saddam Hussein's Mythic Memorials

To better understand the historical and contemporary context of last week’s drama in New Orleans over de-Confederatizing the city’s public landscape, it might be helpful to shift our gaze from the banks of the Mississippi to the banks of the Tigris.

It may seem strange to compare Confederate statuary erected in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century South to the self-aggrandizing monuments built by former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. But despite the vast differences in time, geography, and culture, there is a certain symmetry between Saddam’s attempt to unite Iraqis by …

With Free State of Jones, Hollywood’s Civil War Comes Closer to History’s

Pop Culture May Finally Be Ready to Surrender the Myth of a Noble, Confederate Lost Cause

The setting is the piney woods of Civil War Jones County, Mississippi. The white farmer Newt Knight leads a band of deserters against Confederate forces. An enslaved woman, Rachel, lends …

Washington-Lee High School (Arlington, Va.)

Sweating through the Guilt

I couldn’t resist. I tried, I really did. I stayed away for more than a year, but in the end I succumbed. I pledged in The Washington Post that I …