AMERICAN DEGENERACY in ARTFORUM

June 27, 2020

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View of Frederick Wellington Ruckstull’s Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Baltimore covered in red paint, August 14, 2017. Photo: Jerry Jackson/Getty.

SOME HAVE BEEN INCLINED to view the recent removal of Civil War monuments as a turn away from the past. To many of us, however, it is a prompt not for less but rather for more history—which is to say more clear-eyed, more unflinching, more detailed historical inquiry—that would help us better understand the circumstances under which those markers were erected in the first place, often decades after the war’s end.

This is just one of many stories comprising that history, one that I think should be better known.

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