“The author argues that the time has come to give up the Confederate battle flag as a public symbol. A sense of southern identity, though, should be preserved.”

For most of this century, public memory in the South has cherished the noble Lost Cause. The Confederate monument in Yazoo City, Mississippi, erected in 1909 by the local United Daughters of the Confederacy, tells the story in one sentence: “As at Thermopolyae, the greater glory was to the vanquished.”