This book, a compilation of essays edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, examines ideologies and issues associated with commemoration and the creation of Civil War monuments. The fourteen chapters, essays written by scholars in a number of disciplines, are divided into four parts: “The Rites of Memory: Differing Perspectives,” “Heroes and Heroines of the South,” Celebration and Responses to the North,” and “Changing Times, Reshaping History.” A recurring theme throughout the compendium is society’s need to celebrate, romanticize, and filter history through the memorializing process. The introduction, written by Mills, succinctly provides an overview of the contents. Although diverse topics are investigated, the book’s title indicates that a major theme is the role of women in the realization of monuments for the “Lost Cause.”

Five essays, distributed through the book’s four sections, emphasize these roles. Chapter 1, “ ‘A Strong Force of Ladies’: Women, Politics, and Confederate Memorial Associations in Nineteenth-Century Raleigh,” by Catherine W. Bishir, chronicles the establishment of the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Wake County, N.C., and the organization’s practical, apolitical objectives: to transfer and bury the Confederate dead in appropriate nonfederal cemeteries and to care for these graves. The association addressed this need immediately after the end of the Civil War during the stressful period when the region was under Federal rule and Confederate bodies were segregated from Federal dead. Bishir also traces the more active social and political roles women played in the later North Carolina Monumental Association, which sponsored and raised funds for a Confederate monument unveiled in Raleigh in 1895. Chapter 4, “ ‘Woman’s Hand and Heart and Deathless Love’: White Women and the Commemorative Impulse in the New South,” by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, focuses on the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association of Pensacola, Fla., and provides insights into the political and social roles of volunteer organizations at the end of the nineteenth century. Chapter 5, “The Great Lee Chapel Controversy and the ‘Little Group of Willful Women’ Who Saved the Shrine of the South,” by Pamela H. Simpson, examines the debate about preserving or rebuilding the university chapel and tomb of Robert E. Lee at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. This controversy, in the author’s words, “reveals much about the memorialization process, about early efforts at historic preservation, about differences between early-twentieth-century ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ views and about the differences in male and female approaches to power” (85). Chapter 8, “The Virtuous Soldier: Constructing a Usable Confederate Past in Franklin, Tennessee,” by David Currey, examines the critical role of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in realizing the Franklin monument. Currey places this role in context of the changes in social and economical perspectives at the turn of the twentieth century. He theorizes that the Confederate soldier was transformed from defeated victim of battle to moral icon of devotion and sacrifice with the objective of educating and inspiring a new generation of Southerners “by extolling the patriotic values of the soldier who sacrificed his life for a cause greater than himself” (144). Karen L. Cox’s essay, “The Confederate Monument at Arlington: A Token of Reconciliation” (chapter 9), investigates the social and political climate that allowed and encouraged the inclusion of Southern soldiers in the National Cemetery, a site that formerly excluded the Rebel dead, and the erection of a monument to those dead. The United Daughters of the Confederacy played an active role in instigating and realizing these activities. Cox contends that the richly sculptured monument, unveiled in 1914, and its romanticized interpretation of the South at war reflect an idealistic transformation and vindication of the Southern soldier on the national scene.

The glorification of the Southern soldier and Civil War history through architectural structures is examined by William M. S. Rasmussen, who chronicles the history of the Richmond, Va., Confederate Memorial Institute in chapter 10, “Planning a Temple to the Lost Cause: The Confederate ‘Battle Abbey.’ ” The intent of the project was to venerate Southern history at a time when the Grant Memorial was proposed and constructed. Rasmussen examines several competing designs in different styles and concludes that the final stylistic choice of classical revival had “given visual form to the analogy that the South was the Athens of America” (174).

Although the commemorative role of white Southern women is a recurrent topic of the book, the contents also deal broadly with the diverse attitudes that reflect the changing cultural roles associated with race and gender. Chapter 11, “Gratitude and Gender Wars,” by Cynthia Mills, examines the role of men who erected monuments to the valor and strength of Southern women. “Partly in response to the northern assault on southern gender relations,” she writes, “southern veterans made their women part of all public remembrances of the war and repeatedly expressed public gratitude for their qualities of beauty, morality, and loyalty” (185). Mills illustrates six sculptural monuments and provides insights into the positive and critical climate of an early-twentieth-century culture attempting to interpret the ideal Confederate woman of the 1860s. She concludes, “In the end, the monuments were tributes to a lost past that could no longer be a model for southern women—or southern men” (197).

A monument to Southern white women is one topic discussed by Grace Elizabeth Hale in chapter 13, “Granite Stopped Time: Stone Mountain Memorial and the Representation of White Southern Identity.” An early design for the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial included a proposed but never realized sanctuary: “a vast hall in white women’s honor carved into the heart of the mountain” with a sculpture that “would memorialize white women’s wartime courage and suffering” (223). Hale examines the evolution of this memorial and contends that the “story of the carving of the mountain … revealed much more about white southerners than the memorial was intended to tell” (221); she also follows reactions to the monument into modern times with the image of Martin Luther King, Jr., projected onto the granite dome as part of a laser light show at Stone Mountain Park in the 1980s.

Chapter 6, by Richard Guy Wilson, examines the grandeur and status associated with the establishment of Monument Avenue in Richmond, while chapter 14, “Preservation and Meaning on Richmond’s Monument Avenue,” by Brian Black and Bryn Varley, focuses on the modern inclusion of a contemporary monument to the black tennis star Arthur Ashe among the statues of white male Confederate icons on Monument Avenue. Several essays address racial issues relevant to Civil War commemoration. The changing character of emancipation celebrations among blacks is discussed in chapter 3, “Making History: African American Commemorative Celebrations in Augusta, Georgia, 1865–1913,” by Kathleen Clark. She concludes, “Nurturing their own visions of the past and the future, African Americans’ annual celebrations were a crucial reminder, to themselves and to white Augustans, that white southerners’ power was immense but not complete and that African Americans would persist in pressing forward to a truly new south” (60). Chapter 12, by Micki McElya and entitled “Commemorating the Color Line: The National Mammy Monument Controversy of the 1920s,” analyzes the motivations behind the desire and eventually unsuccessful drive by the Daughters of the Confederacy to construct a nostalgic national monument to the black mammy.

Political motivation, a recurring facet of memorialization interwoven throughout the book, is examined in chapter 2, “Marking Union Victory in the South: The Construction of the National Cemetery System,” by Catherine W. Zipf. This author proposes that the establishment of military cemeteries in the vicinity of battlefields was motivated not only by necessity but also by a political agenda, especially that of asserting the victorious presence of Federal authority in Southern states. In chapter 7, “Personalizing the Political: The Davis Family Circle in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery,” M. Anna Fariello proposes a more individualized interpretation of political implications. She examines three monuments that mark Jefferson Davis’s family plot, provides insights into reasons for the diversity of the sculptures, all by the same sculptor, and supports the idea that “each is a symbol of the changing ideals and conflicts that marked life in the postwar South” (116).

Although diverse subjects are examined, the threads that tie these essays together are topics that investigate the original responses to the loss of lives, the responses to grief and mourning, and the nostalgia and changing attitudes toward the events that shaped these monuments. The exploration and recognition of changing social and racial attitudes that go beyond the Civil War and its immediate aftermath makes the book pertinent to current history and culture and useful to scholars in different disciplines. Each essay is thoroughly documented with footnotes that support theories, adding additional depth and information for readers and researchers. Bibliography provides further, mostly current, source materials.