Description: Even without the right to vote, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy proved to have enormous social and political influence throughout the South--all in the name of preserving Confederate culture. Karen L. Cox's history of the UDC, an organization founded in 1894 to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause, shows why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure.
Brief description: Karen L. Cox is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South and Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, and is the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History.
Review Quotes:
"Highlights the central role the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) played in creating and sustaining the myth of the Lost Cause in early-twentieth-century southern culture."--Choice
"The definitive history of the UDC."--Daily Beast
"This younger generation of white southern women was committed to the public vindication of their parent's wartime experiences. They did this through a massive program of monument building, but as Cox astutely argues, they were even more effective in promoting a pro-Confederate interpretation of the Civil War."--American Historical Review
"Demonstrates the UDC's many kinds of influence on generations of white southerners."--Journal of American History
"Cox . . . argues convincingly that it was women who, by the turn of the twentieth century, were the true keepers of the Confederate flame. . . . Her book is a valuable contribution to the historiography of the Lost Cause."--Journal of Southern History
"Provides a much-needed institutional history of the UDC at the height of its influence. . . . Emphasizes that women, not men, shaped the South's memory of the war and thereby perpetuated a 'Confederate culture' that celebrated mainly the veterans but also the women of the wartime generation and that rested on a coherent narrative of the South's history."--Southern Cultures
"Adds a new dimension to the growing scholarship on the creation of historical memory. Cox treats her subjects as vital, influential political actors and integrates them into the Progressive Era by suggesting that southern women displayed their own, unique brand of activism."--H-Net Reviews