Will I love Smashing Statues?

This book tells the story of when, why, and by whom Confederate monuments were erected in the United States.

I love its careful attention to race and class, which helps us to understand how this process consolidated white supremacy but also undermined a revolutionary working-class politics. There is a terrific chapter on Stone Mountain in Georgia, which has been described as "the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world."

The historical context provided by the book helped me to make sense of what was at stake in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and in… show more.

Iconoclasm isn’t new. The word means, literally, “image destroying.”

History is littered with instances going back to Antiquity. But something fresh is happening right now in the United States.

Smashing Monuments is a lively, bracing, much-needed account of the iconoclasm roiling contemporary America’s public landscape, particularly in the wake of the white supremacists’ murderous march in Charlottesville in 2017 and George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police in 2020.

Captivating reportage and historically informed analysis, from the unique perspective of a scholar of art history and law, propels our reconsideration of American public icons, their origins, their sometimes-sordid purposes, their standing,… show more.