A Spatiotemporal Examination of Confederate Monuments in the Former Confederacy

This article examines Confederate monuments, statues, and plaques in the eleven states of the former Confederacy based on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Whose Heritage” data. Focusing on commemorative trends over time, this research seeks to undermine certain assumptions about the history of Confederate monuments in the South. First, there is significant variation across the eleven states of the Confederacy. Second, Confederate monuments continued to be dedicated throughout the 1920s and 1930s in some states, and in others, across the twentieth century. Finally, there are more Confederate monuments standing today than there were in 1980. This research proposes some speculative interpretations of these findings, but its objective is to provide researchers with avenues for further research into divergent trends in monumentation with the goal of crafting interpretations of a varied Southern commemorative landscape.