Investigates how Americans have remembered violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments, historical markers, college classrooms, and history books.
George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020 sparked a national reckoning for the United States that had been 400 years in the making. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest both the murder and the centuries of systemic racism that already existed among European colonists but transformed with the arrival of the first enslaved African Americans in 1619. The violence needed to enforce that systemic racism for all those years, from the slave driver’s whip to state-sponsored police brutality, attracted the immediate attention of the protesters. The resistance of the protesters echoed generations of African Americans’ resisting the violence and oppression of white supremacy. Their opposition to violence soon spread to other aspects of systemic racism, including a cultural hegemony built on and reinforcing white supremacy. At the heart of this white supremacist culture is the memory of the Civil War era, when in 1861 8 million white Americans revolted against their country to try to safeguard the enslavement of 4 million African Americans.
The volume has three interconnected sections that build on one another. The first section, “Violence,” explores systemic racism in the Civil War era and now with essays on slavery, policing, and slave patrols. The second section, titled “Resistance,” shows how African Americans resisted violence for the past two centuries, with essays discussing matters including self-emancipation and African American soldiers. The final section, “Memory,” investigates how Americans have remembered this violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments and historical markers.
This volume is intended for nonhistorians interested in showing the intertwined and longstanding connections between systemic racism, violence, resistance, and the memory of the Civil War era in the United States that finally exploded in the summer of 2020.

Hilary N. Green is James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies, Africana Studies Department, Davidson College. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (Fordham) and numerous essays and articles. In addition, she is working on two book projects—a manuscript examining how everyday African Americans remembered and commemorated the Civil War and another exploring campus slavery, race, and memory at the University of Alabama.

Hilary Green's profile page

Andrew L. Slap is Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (Fordham University Press, 2006).and editor of Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s
Aftermath (University Press of Kentucky, 2010). His current project on African American communities around Memphis during the Civil War era is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Andrew L. Slap's profile page

Andre E. Johnson is an associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Memphis. He is the author of three national award-winning books, The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012), The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter (with Amanda Nell Edgar, Ph.D., 2018), and No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (2020). He is also the editor of the forthcoming The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit (2023) and Preaching During a Pandemic: The Rhetoric of the Black Preaching Tradition (with Kimberly P. Johnson, Ph.D. and Wallis C. Baxter IV, Ph.D., 2023).

Andre E. Johnson's profile page

John Bardes is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University. His work explores policing and incarceration in the context of slavery and emancipation.

John Bardes' profile page

Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University. She received the Ph.D. in history from Howard University. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African American History; Georgia Historical Quarterly; Passport; U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations (2008); Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians (2012); Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora (2013); and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2014). She has published Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award. Her current book, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Karen Cook Bell's profile page

Daryl A. Carter is professor of history in the Department of History and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of Brother Bill: President Clinton and The Politics of Race & Class (The University of Arkansas, 2016).

Daryl A. Carter's profile page

Beau Cleland is an assistant professor of history at the University of Calgary. He is the author
of “Sustaining the Confederacy: Informal Diplomacy, Anglo-Confederate Relations,
and Blockade Running in the Bahamas” for the Journal of Southern History (forthcoming,
2023). He previously served as an officer in the United States Army, with service in Iraq
and Afghanistan.

Beau D. Cleland's profile page

Emmanuel Dabney is a public historian based in Virginia. He holds a B.A. in Historic Preservation from the University of Mary Washington and a M.A. in History with a concentration in Public History from UNC-Greensboro. Emmanuel has given numerous presentations and written other essays and book reviews.

Emmanuel Dabney's profile page

Adam H. Domby's profile page

Myisha S. Eatmon is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies and of History Department at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her dissertation, Public Wrongs, Private Rights: African Americans, Private Law, and White Violence during Jim Crow, traces the history of what I call black legal culture under Jim Crow, examining black litigation strategies in response to white violence, black newspapers’ coverage of white violence, and black newspapers and the NAACP’s work as legal networkers. She was an ASLH Kathryn T. Preyer Scholar (2018), J. Willard Hurst Fellow (2019), and ACLS/Mellon DCF Fellow (2018-2019).

Myisha S. Eatmon's profile page

Barbara A. Gannon is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (UNC Press), which received the Wiley-Silver Prize for the best first book on the Civil War and an honorable mention by the Lincoln Prize Committee 2012, as well as being a finalist for the Jefferson Davis Prize. She has also published Americans Remember their Civil War (Praeger) and numerous articles.

Barbara Gannon's profile page

Scott Hancock is an associate professor of history and Africana Studies at Gettysburg College. After spending 14 years working with teenagers in crisis, he switched careers and received a Ph.D. in Early American History in 1999 from the University of New Hampshire. This combination of careers fuels his desire to tell the stories of people whom society and history have tended to discount as troublesome and unimportant. Currently, he is exploring how whiteness, white supremacy and the systematic rejection of blackness were the unifying features of white American identity and politics across the North-South divide, and how that unity was manifested during the creation of Civil War battlefields. Some of his work scholarly work has appeared in the anthologies Paths to Freedom, We Shall Independent Be, Slavery, Resistance, Freedom, and in the Journal Civil War History. As part of trying to continue being an activist scholar, he engages in dialogue with visitors to the Gettysburg battlefields, as well as contributing to local & regional newspapers such as the Gettysburg Times and Philadelphia Inquirer or online publications such as CityLab.

Scott Hancock's profile page

William Horne is an Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University who writes about the relationship of race to labor, freedom, and capitalism in post-Civil War Louisiana. He holds a PhD in history from The George Washington University and is co-founder and Editor of The Activist History Review.

William Horne's profile page

LeeAnna Keith teaches history at the Collegiate School for Boys in New York City. She is the author of When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang) and The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Oxford University Press).

LeeAnna Keith's profile page

Jonathan Lande is an assistant professor history at Purdue University. He earned his Ph.D. at Brown University in 2018 and won the Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Cromwell Dissertation Prize from the American Society for Legal History. He is currently completing a book exploring the desertions and mutinies of formerly enslaved men in the Union army and their trials in the military justice system during the Civil War, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. Lande has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of African American History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Civil War History, and the Washington Post.

Jonathan Lande's profile page

Anne Marshall is associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She is the author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She is also the author of numerous articles in journals and collections including Slavery & Abolition, Agricultural History, and Master Narratives: Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South (Louisiana State University Press, Spring (2013). In 2011 she won the George and Ann Richards Award for best article in The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Anne Marshall's profile page

Jaime Amanda Martinez is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and the author of Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South (UNC Press, 2013).

Jaime Amanda Martinez's profile page

Nicole Turner is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. She is the author of Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Post-Emancipation Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Nicole Turner's profile page

Samuel Watts received his PhD from the University of Melbourne, researching and writing about Black experiences of Reconstruction in the Urban Deep South. He is the Managing Editor of ANZASA Online, writes for the Australian Book Review, and was recently awarded the Wyselaskie Scholarship for History.

Samuel Watts' profile page

Hilary Green and Andy Slap, two extraordinary scholars of the Civil War era, have gathered a diverse group of historians to illuminate anti-Black racism in the past and present. The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 offers a mix of well-established and up-and-coming experts who detail topics that are both familiar and unknown—policing, monuments, sports, religion, resistance, and the Civil War’s impact on Australia and its Indigenous peoples. This collection of impressive essays takes a much-needed communal approach by having scholars lead history-curious readers back in time to understand the present. This book is essential reading for anyone who understands the importance of a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history as a resource for building a more just world.---Kidada E. Williams, author of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction, and host of the Seizing Freedom podcast.