Print Culture and the Enduring Legacy of Confederate War Monuments

This chapter illustrates the rise and spread of Confederate monuments at the local level by focusing how they were promoted and disseminated in print. It also shows how the lasting effects of this cultural work influence the current historical moment and, as such, makes a transhistorical argument for how the myths and values of the Confederacy have endured the twentieth century and have uncannily come to dominate the twenty-first century. By attending to the production and circulation of ephemeral print, which was produced by small, local publishers and distributed regionally, readers gain a more nuanced understanding of how the communities who produced these monuments adapted residual and emergent communication networks and technologies to engender enthusiasm for these monuments as well as how they appropriated pre-existing cultural norms and mythologies in order to normalize and perpetuate a revised system of white supremacy.