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With over 150 monuments, Richmond ranks among the nation's best cities in devotion to its past, its leaders and its famous citizens. But the storied history of Virginia's capital extends far beyond its most famous figures. Whether memorializing the captivating stories of famous Richmonders Nina Abady and Sam Woods, celebrating the life of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson or honoring the achievements of prominent medical leaders, public art in Richmond is a testament to the perseverance and ingenuity of the city and its people. Journey into times past with author Robert Layton as he uncovers the enthralling history of Richmond through its often-overlooked monuments.
An illustrated history of Richmond, Virginia's Monument Avenue, showing the most prestigious homes and distinguished architecture, as well as the statues that have often been a source of controversy.
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.
The New Orleans mayor who removed the Confederate statues confronts the racism that shapes us and argues for white America to reckon with its past. A passionate, personal, urgent book from the man who sparked a national debate. "There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it." When Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of New Orleans in May 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve nationally, and his speech has now been heard or seen by millions across the country. In his first book, Mayor Landrieu discusses his personal journey on race as well as the path he took to making the decision to remove the monuments, tackles the broader history of slavery, race and institutional inequities that still bedevil America, and traces his personal relationship to this history. His father, as state legislator and mayor, was a huge force in the integration of New Orleans in the 1960s and 19070s. Landrieu grew up with a progressive education in one of the nation's most racially divided cities, but even he had to relearn Southern history as it really happened. Equal parts unblinking memoir, history, and prescription for finally confronting America's most painful legacy, In the Shadow of Statues contributes strongly to the national conversation about race in the age of Donald Trump, at a time when racism is resurgent with seemingly tacit approval from the highest levels of government and when too many Americans have a misplaced nostalgia for a time and place that never existed.
In Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans's Confederate Statues James Gill and Howard Hunter examine New Orleans’s complicated relationship with the history of the Confederacy pre– and post–Civil War. The authors open and close their manuscript with the dramatic removal of the city’s Confederate statues. On the eve of the Civil War, New Orleans was far more cosmopolitan than Southern, with its sizable population of immigrants, Northern-born businessmen, and white and Black Creoles. Ambivalent about secession and war, the city bore divided loyalties between the Confederacy and the Union. However, by 1880 New Orleans rivaled Richmond as a bastion of the Lost Cause. After Appomattox, a significant number of Confederate veterans moved into the city giving elites the backing to form a Confederate civic culture. While it’s fair to say that the three Confederate monuments and the white supremacist Liberty Monument all came out of this dangerous nostalgia, the authors argue that each monument embodies its own story and mirrors the city and the times. The Lee monument expressed the bereavement of veterans and a desire to reconcile with the North, though strictly on their own terms. The Davis monument articulated the will of the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association to solidify the Lost Cause and Southern patriotism. The Beauregard Monument honored a local hero, but also symbolized the waning of French New Orleans and rising Americanization. The Liberty Monument, throughout its history, represented white supremacy and the cruel hypocrisy of celebrating a past that never existed. While the book is a narrative of the rise and fall of the four monuments, it is also about a city engaging history. Gill and Hunter contextualize these statues rather than polarize, interviewing people who are on both sides including citizens, academics, public intellectuals, and former mayor Mitch Landrieu. Using the statues as a lens, the authors construct a compelling narrative that provides a larger cultural history of the city.
A leading expert on the past, present, and future of public monuments in America. An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? Which ones should stay up and which should come down? Who should make these decisions, and how? Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles, brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She lays bare the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, from the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol, to the fervent Klansman fired from sculpting the world’s largest Confederate monument—who went on to carve Mount Rushmore. And she explores the surprising motivations behind contemporary flashpoints, including the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol, the question of who should be represented on the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, and the decision by a museum of African American culture to display a Confederate monument removed from a public park. Written with great verve and informed by a keen sense of American history, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental questions for rebuilding not only our public landscape but our nation as a whole: Whose voices must be heard, and whose pain must remain private?
From the award-winning, bestselling author of Skyscrapers, Churches, and Bridges comes a stunning visual history that serves as a tribute to classic American landmarks.
The James River is the centerpiece of Richmond, but by the mid-twentieth century it had been abused and neglected. Eagles and sturgeon had nearly disappeared, water-powered industry was abandoning it and the river was a sewer. Today, the river draws visitors to its wooded shorelines, restored canal and feisty rapids. At the local level, this transformation was the result of citizen action, public-private partnerships, difficult decisions by governmental leaders and the hard work of thousands of passionate advocates and volunteers. Local author and lifelong river watcher Ralph Hambrick chronicles the events, projects and controversies that brought about the dramatic change and lends a critical eye to the results.
On the day after Christmas in 1811, the state of Virginia lost its governor and almost one hundred citizens in a devastating nighttime fire that consumed a Richmond playhouse. During the second act of a melodramatic tale of bandits, ghosts, and murder, a small fire kindled behind the backdrop. Within minutes, it raced to the ceiling timbers and enveloped the audience in flames. The tragic Richmond Theater fire would inspire a national commemoration and become its generation's defining disaster. A vibrant and bustling city, Richmond was synonymous with horse races, gambling, and frivolity. The gruesome fire amplified the capital's reputation for vice and led to an upsurge in antitheater criticism that spread throughout the country and across the Atlantic. Clerics in both America and abroad urged national repentance and denounced the stage, a sentiment that nearly destroyed theatrical entertainment in Richmond for decades. Local churches, by contrast, experienced a rise in attendance and became increasingly evangelical. In The Richmond Theater Fire, the first book about the event and its aftermath, Meredith Henne Baker explores a forgotten catastrophe and its wide societal impact. The story of transformation comes alive through survivor accounts of slaves, actresses, ministers, and statesmen. Investigating private letters, diaries, and sermons, among other rare or unpublished documents, Baker views the event and its outcomes through the fascinating lenses of early nineteenth-century theater, architecture, and faith, and reveals a rich and vital untold story from America's past.