Description
Book SynopsisExamines New Orleans's complicated relationship with the history of the Confederacy pre- and post-Civil War. The book opens and closes with the dramatic removal of the city's Confederate statues. While the book is a narrative of the rise and fall of the four monuments, it is also about a city engaging history.
Trade ReviewThis well-researched book puts into historical context the useful discussion we had in New Orleans about removing Confederate monuments. It is important for us to understand history, to memorialize it, and to continually reassess it. This can be a difficult balance. James Gill and Howard Hunter do a judicious job of listening to all perspectives.
Tearing Down the Lost Cause is a highly readable match of narrative history and journalism at its best—probing, dispassionate, with a seasoned take on historical memory warped by myth. Beyond its appeal to general readers, James Gill and Howard Hunter have delivered a gift to college professors and high school teachers tasked with giving young people a fair-minded viewfinder on raging issues of our day and the long arc of justice. Fraught with hard feeling, the subject of the Lost Cause and fallen monuments nowadays is almost guaranteed to end in daggers drawn. So, it’s refreshing to discover a narrative that manages to stay evenhanded without pulling punches.
Tearing Down the Lost Cause is how history is supposed to be written. James Gill and Howard Hunter revisit the bygone days surrounding New Orleans’s Civil War statuary. In so doing, expertly and without fanfare, they nudge us closer to common ground. The fact that it looks increasingly unattainable is all the more reason for making the effort. A must read. As if untangling Mardi Gras beads, Gill and Hunter deftly deconstruct the bruising history behind the removal of the New Orleans Confederate monuments: a satisfying read.
