EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
SPLC Learning for Justice
The webpage offers a variety of free educational resources focused on social justice topics. Resources include lesson plans, student texts, tasks, teaching strategies, film kits, and more. The materials aim to foster relevance, rigor, and social emotional learning in classrooms. There’s also a feature for building a customized learning plan aligned with the Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards. Additionally, it hosts an international campaign called “Mix It Up at Lunch Day” to encourage students to cross social boundaries.
Zinn Education Project
The Zinn Education Project provides a variety of teaching materials to explore history from different perspectives. Resources are organized by time period, theme, and type. It offers news, lessons, and campaigns on topics like climate justice and racial equity, among others. The site also hosts workshops and conferences for further engagement. In addition, there’s support and detailed information about the project’s impact and highlights available on the website.
MOCA Digital Curriculum Guide
MOCA has created a digital curriculum to help educators facilitate moments of creativity and conversation around a selection of artworks in this exhibition. In collaboration with a local high school teacher who participated in the MONUMENTS Advisory Council, this resource has been developed to center contemporary voices and perspectives in considering United States history
Whose Heritage?
Since 2022, the year of the third edition of this report, progress in the number of Confederate memorials removed or renamed has slowed, but it has not stopped. The work continues.This fourth installment of SPLC’s Whose Heritage? report offers an evolving assessment of the threats and harms that find continued life through Confederate symbols, “Lost Cause” narratives
and ideologies of white supremacy.
Facing History
Facing History and Ourselves is a global organization that empowers teachers and students through historical lessons to challenge bigotry and hatred. Originating from a single classroom in 1976, it has grown into a network engaging millions worldwide. The organization values curiosity, empathy, and active listening, fostering a culture of understanding and standing up against injustice. Their mission extends beyond the classroom, preparing students for active civic participation to create a better future.
Monument Lab
Monument Lab is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, focusing on public art and history. It encourages critical dialogues about monuments, exploring their past, present, and future implications. Their process involves researching statues or public spaces, engaging with stakeholders, redefining monument conversations, creating experimental platforms for art and research, and sharing findings to steer new directions in how monuments are perceived and interacted with, thereby democratizing historical narratives.
Equal Justice Initiative
EJI believes we need a new era of truth and justice that starts with confronting our history of racial injustice. American history begins with the creation of a myth to absolve white settlers of the genocide of Native Americans: the false belief that nonwhite people are less human than white people. This belief in racial hierarchy survived slavery’s abolition, fueled racial terror lynchings, demanded legally codified segregation, and spawned our mass incarceration crisis.
SELECTED READINGS
John C. Calhoun, Slavery as a Positive Good Speech, February 6, 1837, Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-on-abolition-petitions/.
Alexander H. Stephens, Cornerstone Speech, March 21, 1861, Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-corner-stone-speech/.
Constitution of the Confederate States, March 11, 1861, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp.
Julian S. Carr, Silent Sam Dedication Speech, June 2, 1913, University of North Carolina, English 105 Online Curriculum Module, https://guides.lib.unc.edu/documenting-student-activism/1.
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy, 3rd ed., 2022, https://www.splcenter.org/20220201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy-third-edition.
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 2022, https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/#conclusion-tst-intro.
—–, Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade, 2018, https://eji.org/report/slavery-in-america/.
—–, Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876, 2020, https://eji.org/report/reconstruction-in-america/.
—–, Segregation in America, 2018, https://segregationinamerica.eji.org/report/.
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
—–, and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Beetham, Sarah. “‘An Army of Bronze Simulacra’: The Copied Soldier Monument and the American Civil War.” Nierika: Revista de Estudios de Arte 4, no. 7 (2015): 34–45.
Bingham, Emily. My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song. New York: Knopf, 2022.
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Brown, Thomas J. Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Brown Pryor, Elizabeth. Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007.
Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Cobb, Charles E., Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
Connelly, Thomas L. The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.
—–, and Barbara L. Bellows. God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.
Coski, John M. The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. 2nd ed. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019.
—–. No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
Craig, Lee A. Josephus Daniels: His Life & Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Darity, William A., Jr., and A. Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
Domby, Adam H. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.
Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
Elder, Robert. Calhoun: American Heretic. New York: Basic
Books, 2021.
Fahs, Alice, and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Farrow, Anne, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank. Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.
Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.
—–. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
—–. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
—–. The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.
Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Frantz Parsons, Elaine. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Gillespie McRae, Elizabeth. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Gilpin Faust, Drew. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008.
Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Gordon, Linda. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. New York: Liveright, 2018.
Groom, Amelia. Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021.
Guelzo, Allen C. Robert E. Lee: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2021.
Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hettle, Wallace. Inventing Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History and Memory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011.
Hinton, Elizabeth. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s. New York: Liveright, 2021.
Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton, eds. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Ifill, Sherrilyn A. On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.
Janney, Caroline E. Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
—–. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New York: Yale University Press, 2019.
Kytle, Ethan J., and Blain Roberts. Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. New York: New Press, 2018.
Lehr, Dick. The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War. New York: PublicAffairs, 2015.
Levin, Kevin M. Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Matthews, Glenna. The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Meyer, Eugene L. Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2018.
Mills, Cynthia, and Pamela H. Simpson, eds. Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.
Nelson, Charmaine A. The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Pollard, Edward. The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. New York: E. B. Treat & Co., 1866.
Reeves, John. The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case against an American Icon. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Robertson, James. Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend. New York: Macmillan, 1997.
Ruckstull, Frederick W. Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Co., 1925.
Savage, Kirk. The Civil War in Art and Memory. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2016.
—–. “The Obsolescence of Sculpture.” American Art 24, no. 1 (2010): 9–14.
—–. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Sayers, Daniel O. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.
Shirley, Neal, and Saralee Stafford. Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South. Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2015.
Silber, Nina. This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Smith, Clint. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. Boston: Little, Brown, 2021.
Smith, John David, and J. Vincent Lowery, eds. The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.
Spencer, Hawes. Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018.
Stokes, Melvyn. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Thompson, Erin L. Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022.
Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Upton, Dell. What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.
Younge, Gary. “Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down.” The Guardian, June 1, 2021.
Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.