This presentation looks at how white southerners remembered Confederate defeat after the Civil War, crafting public history through monument construction, school history curriculum, and popular culture. Their efforts were aimed at both shaping the past and the present. The Lost Cause perpetuated a particular historical narrative of the causes and conduct of the war, but also helped to buttress white southerners’ contemporary efforts to implement and maintain conservative racial, social, and economic policies. The presentation also examines how and why Americans outside of the South came to embrace the Lost Cause version of southern history.
Speakers Expertise:
Anne E. Marshall is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Centre College of Kentucky and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2004. She has worked at Mississippi State University since 2006, and teaches numerous graduate level courses, as well as undergraduate courses including Jacksonian American (1825-1850); History of the Old South; and the History of Southern Women.
She is the author of
Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010). She has also published numerous journal articles and essays, two of which have won prizes for best article for the year of publication (
Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 2000 and
Journal of the Civil War Era, 2011). Marshall has presented numerous papers and commented on panels at conferences including the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the Society of Civil War Historians.
Her current book project looks nineteenth century anti-slavery politics through the life of the colorful Kentucky emancipationist Cassius M. Clay.
