News Topic

AHA in the News

Thematic

Cultural, Public History

AHA executive director James Grossman was quoted in a New York Times article by Orlando Mayorquin and Rebecca Carballo about the removal of a prominent Confederate statue from Arlington National Cemetery, which was halted by a judge shortly after removal efforts began. “The statue was a way of reminding Americans who was in charge in the South and what the true traditions of the South were,” Grossman said of the statue, which the United Daughters of the Confederacy began planning for in 1906 to promote the“lost cause” narrative of the Civil War. “It’s one of hundreds of statues that were created across the South in the first two decades of the 20th century whose purpose was to make sure that everybody knows that this is a white country, and that slavery was legitimate and benign.”