Episode 149: Confederate Monuments with Dr. Karen Cox

Dr. Karen Cox drops in to talk about the Trump Administration's plans to reinstall two former Confederate monuments, along with the Lost Cause mythology, and how we think about the Civil War.

About our guest:

Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.  She is the author of four books, the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history and has written numerous essays and articles, including an essay for the New York Times best seller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, which was published in April 2021 and won the Michael V.R. Thomason book prize from the Gulf South Historical Association.

A successful public intellectual, Dr. Cox has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Huffington Post. She has given dozens of media interviews in the U.S. and around the globe, especially on the topic of Confederate monuments. She appeared in Henry Louis Gates’s PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Lucy Worsley’s American History’s Biggest Fibs for the BBC, and the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments.

Cox is a professor emerita of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she taught from 2002-2024. She is currently writing a book that explores themes of the Great Migration, the Black press, and early Chicago jazz through the forgotten tragedy of the Rhythm Club fire, which took the lives of more than 200 African Americans in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1940.

You can follow her on Bluesky @DrKarenLCox.bsky.social