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The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That's why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen. Has this series exposed you to new ideas? Tell us how. Email us at ourpicks@nytimes.com.

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A statue honoring Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Credit... Matt Eich for The New York Times

* Gracy Olmstead in The Federalist:
"We should also consider which parts of our history we are most proud of, and most eager to uphold. Conservatives believe in preserving and carrying on the best of the past - not its worst."
If the events of the past week prove anything to Ms. Olmstead, "it's that these memorials are splitting us further and further apart." She urges her readers - even those who do not want to see these statues taken down - to "seek to understand and sympathize" with those who support their removal. At the very least, she writes, "we can mitigate their toxic effect" by adding context or erecting new memorials. Read more "

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* Ben Shapiro in The Daily Wire:
"Everyone is trying to use the issue of Confederate monument removal as a club to wield against political opposition, and as a broadening mechanism for their own movements."
For Mr. Shapiro, the issue at hand has nothing to do with Confederate monuments. The reason we're really "talking about statues," he writes, is that they serve as a proxy argument for larger, political fights. The "truth" is that "Confederate statue removal is a local issue, not a national one." Read more "

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* Rod Dreher in The American Conservative:
"He fought for the wrong side and deserved to lose. But notice that after he lost, he called on all defeated Southerners to cease hostilities and to commit themselves to the service of the United States. [...] It mattered that he did not urge bitter resistance, but rather nobly counseled patriotism."
After New Orleans decided to take down its statue of Robert E. Lee in May, Mr. Dreher wrote a response to the controversy. He said he is "not losing sleep" over the removal of other Confederate leaders, but he's troubled by the move to take down a memorial to Lee, a "far more complex man" than many people realize. Read more "

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* Jonathan S. Tobin in The New York Post:
"A generation ago, nobody would have thought Washington or Jefferson controversial. Now it appears that even Mount Rushmore isn't safe, since among its quartet of greats, only Lincoln might be exempt from the iconoclasts."

Mr. Tobin believes the slippery slope reasoning of the president and others is not merely hypothetical - the logical result of the left's attempt to take down offensive statues has already been borne out in real life. He cites as his example an attempt to take down a famous statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of New York's Natural History Museum. Read more "

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The empty pedestal of a statue that was pulled down by protesters in Durham, N.C., on Monday. Credit... Madeline Gray for The New York Times

* Gersh Kuntzman in The New York Daily News:
"Ever wonder why there are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Berlin?"
Mr. Kuntzman argues that Americans should treat their Confederate history the same way that Germany treats its Nazi past. He points out that "monuments are never about history itself" but rather about "what the people putting up the monument think about history." Read more "

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* Tyler Zimmer in Jacobin:
"The Confederate flag lionizes both racists and class traitors - indeed the two are inseparable."
According to Mr. Zimmer, the symbols of the Confederacy are not just about white supremacy, but also, inextricably, about class. Confederate flags and monuments, he writes, signify a "campaign by elites to hoodwink poor whites into throwing their lives away to protect ruling class wealth and privilege." Read more "

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* Adam Serwer in The Atlantic:
"To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield."

Mr. Serwer takes on the "myth of the kindly General Lee," arguing that this was a man "whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country." There's no way, he writes, that one can defend Lee in "good conscience" unless one puts "tribe and race over country." Read more "

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Workers in Baltimore removed a Confederate statue early on Wednesday. Credit... Jerry Jackson/The Baltimore Sun, via Associated Press

* Eric Boehm in Reason:
"Baltimore offers a primer on the nonsensical slippery slope argument offered by defenders of the Confederate monuments."
At his news conference, Mr. Trump posed a rhetorical question to the assembled reporters, "Where does it stop?" Mr. Boehm responds by citing the example of the Baltimore City Council, which just this week unanimously passed a resolution to remove the city's Confederate monuments. Writing in the libertarian publication, Reason, Mr. Boehm puts it simply: "It stops....where it stops." Read more "

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* Ilya Somin in The Washington Post:
"The vast majority of monuments to Confederate leaders were erected to honor their service to the Confederacy, whose main reason for existing was to protect and extend slavery."
There are historical figures that pose a greater moral dilemma than that of Robert E. Lee, posits Mr. Somin. Woodrow Wilson poses one such example. However, he argues, "giving undeserved honor to the evil is at least as grave an error as denying proper recognition to those who merit it." Read more "

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* James M. McPherson in The New York Review of Books:
"The theme of liberty, not slavery, as the cause for which the South fought became a mantra in the writings of old Confederates and has been taken up by neo-Confederates in our own time."

In a 2001 article, Mr. McPherson traces the ways in which Confederate history has been rewritten to excise slavery as the animating issue at the heart of the Civil War and replace it with a "Lost Cause" theory of the conflict. The Lost Cause myth posits that "slavery was merely an incident," and the conflict was in fact all about "a difference of opinion about the Constitution." Read more "

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* Robert E. Lee in 1869 in The Republican Vindicator, via PBS:
"I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered."
How did Lee feel about Confederate statues? Perhaps it's best to refer to his own writing on the matter. Here, in a letter declining an invitation to attend an event memorializing the battle at Gettysburg, he writes about the importance of moving on. Read more "

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* The New York Times in 1865:
"So long as the South has an admiration for the rebellion, so long will the South be rebel at heart. [...] True patriotic devotion should redeem any portion of the Republic from reproach. It should bury forever every memorial calculated to perpetuate dishonor and disparagement."
On Aug. 16, 1865, 152 years before the most recent debate over memorializing Confederate statues, writers for The Times published this article, advocating the preservation of the "memorials of rebel cruelty." Read more "

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Want the Partisan Writing Roundup in your inbox? Sign up for the Have thoughts about this collection? Email feedback to ourpicks@nytimes.com. Morning Briefing Newsletter or the What We're Reading Newsletter.

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Right and Left on Removal of Confederate Statues (Published 2017)

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The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That's why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen. Has this series exposed you to new ideas?

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C- 2016, it hasn't recently been updated.
R-It disagrees with my claim.
A-Cait/tylt
A-No
P-Inform and persuade

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Protesters at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill tore down a statue honoring university alumni who had died fighting for the Confederacy. The destruction of the statue, known as Silent Sam, has renewed the national debate about what to do with Confederate statues. Advocates for removing the statues say they memorialize racism and honor traitors. But even some who want to keep the statues say that removing them would, in effect, whitewash America's history. What do you think?

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Should all Confederate statues be taken down? | The Tylt

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Protesters at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill tore down a statue honoring university alumni who had died fighting for the Confederacy, renewing the national debate about what to do with Confederate statues. Advocates for removing the statues say they memorialize racism and honor traitors.

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C-August 22, 2019, it hasn't recently been updated.
R- It agrees with my claim statement.
A-Patrik Jonsson/the christian science monitor.
A-No
P-Inform

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Erected in 1911, Atlanta's Peace Monument depicts a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier, "Cease firing - peace is at hand."

Is that a representation of reconciliation - or oppression? Vandals defaced the monument in 2017 after a violent white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked nationwide protests.

Why We Wrote This

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." Many communities are wrestling with that lesson today, as they debate what to do with Confederate monuments - underscoring how their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.

This month, Atlanta added an explanatory plaque at the Peace Monument site, saying the monument "should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood," its original intention.

Two years after Charlottesville, many locales continue to struggle with how to properly present Confederate statuary.

In Georgia and other former Confederate states, state laws prohibit monuments from being removed. That's led cities to look for ways to better explain the stone monuments and their role in history.

Atlanta is beginning with a quick approach: plaques. Besides the Peace Monument, it has added signs at the "Lion of the Confederacy," a stone statue in a city cemetery.

Even writing a plaque can be a fraught process. But officials say the important thing is that just addressing the issue can bring history to life.

"These statues are no longer static. They are now evolving," says Sheffield Hale, president of the Atlanta History Center.

Put up in 1911, the Peace Monument in Atlanta's Piedmont Park features a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier: "Cease firing - peace is proclaimed."

At the time, the monument was meant not to glorify the Confederate cause, but to urge reconciliation, a rekindling of a national bond stretching from Atlanta to Boston. It was built to commemorate peacekeeping trips to the North made by members of the Gate City Guard, Georgia's first militia, in previous years.

But 2019 is different historical country than 1911. What seemed progressive then can today strike some as an oppressive symbol. Vandals defaced the monument following the August 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a "Unite the Right" rally clashed with counterprotesters.

Why We Wrote This

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." Many communities are wrestling with that lesson today, as they debate what to do with Confederate monuments - underscoring how their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.

Atlantans suddenly faced some thorny questions, says Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center: "Why is a peace monument a problem? What's wrong with peace?"

This month, the city of Atlanta installed a sign that presents one answer: the memorial's idea of reconciliation excluded African Americans. "This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood; rather, it should be seen as an artifact representing a shared history in which millions of Americans were denied civil and human rights," the sign states.

Two years after the Charlottesville march and its aftermath, states, cities, and citizens all across America continue to struggle with how to handle and interpret the artifacts of the past in the present day.

In that struggle, different narratives clash with modern distributions of power. Conservative Southern state legislatures have passed laws protecting historical monuments, including Confederate statuary. More liberal local jurisdictions are trying to rethink and reframe the meaning of these relics by surrounding them with context, including explanatory material such as signs and plaques.

The result, as in Atlanta, is a riveting and consequential debate that is about where the nation is going as much as where it has been.

"We are in the process toward a dream," says William Ferris, associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "These statues are markers along the way of how we address both the past and the future as a people. It is an ongoing conversation that in the 21st century is taking an interesting turn as the country is becoming predominantly nonwhite."

Monumental contested meanings

Richard Straut is one of the Atlanta Peace Monument's sworn protectors. He has a different view of its meaning than that expressed by its new accompanying sign.

The former Atlanta detective spent a career in both the police and military working for and with African Americans. He is a former commandant of the Old Guard of the City Guard, entrusted with the monument's care. The Old Guard's patch - a boar's head with an oak leaf in its mouth - now decorates the state National Guard uniform.

"I'm a soldier in the Old Guard, the precursor to our National Guard," says Mr. Straut in a phone interview. "It is integrated. We are not some white supremacist nonsense."

In 1911 the Old Guard wasn't trying to undermine the government in the United States with a peace monument that referenced a Confederate soldier, according to Mr. Straut.

"It was trying to bring the brotherhood back together again, and we succeeded. We are equal. And all races are involved," he says.

The Peace Monument is far from the only memorial whose meaning is contested today, of course. From small town squares to battlefields, the South is strewn with stone memories.

They range from innocuous cemetery markers to obvious paeans to the Confederate Lost Cause, including 75 "Johnny Reb" statues - most crafted after Reconstruction in Northern forges - that stand in public places, by intent, as sentinels of white power.

As of February 2019, 114 Confederate monuments have been taken down since the 2015 attack on a Charleston, South Carolina, church by white supremacist Dylann Roof, including General Robert E. Lee from Lee Circle in New Orleans and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest from a park in Memphis. Some 1,747 still stand, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Many of these monuments are shielded from removal or extensive alteration by state laws passed in the former Confederate states, including Georgia, according to the SPLC. Some cities in these states are challenging the legality of these restrictions. Norfolk, for instance, has sued Virginia to lift the state's removal ban.

Other localities are focusing on adding context. But that process itself is difficult. What to say? How to say it? What is the context here, after all?

"It doesn't surprise me that communities are struggling to some extent with conceptualization, because the writing of new inscriptions is always extremely contentious," says Kirk Savage, author of "Monument Wars."

For its part, Atlanta has tried to move quickly, adding low-cost, fact-based panels that contextualize memorial presence, and bottom-line their intent.

"It is a process to turn them from public statues to outdoor museum exhibits, from statement to artifact," says Mr. Hale of the Atlanta History Center. "And it is recognition that these are not Civil War monuments. They are Jim Crow monuments."

Similar discussions - sometimes heated, often thoughtful - are taking place across the South as more and more Americans realize the monuments "are connected to what is happening to me in the present day," says Mr. Savage, a University of Pittsburgh art historian.

The process of contextualization can be fraught. But inaction can have consequences. The failure of the University of North Carolina to heed calls to contextualize its Confederate "Silent Sam" statue on campus may have helped lead to a mob toppling the statue in 2018.

"We started from a premise of some are going to come down, some are going to stay up, but ... what is next is the really important question: How do we start something that is actually more democratic and more representative and more empowering for people than the old monument system, which is an elite-driven system that almost always tends to reflect the power relations on the ground?" says Mr. Savage. "Our political climate has made it a much more urgent issue."

"The statues are no longer static"

Americans seem at a wary impasse over the Confederate monument issue, polls say.

In the South, a majority of white Americans want the monuments to stay, and a majority of black Americans want them removed, according to a Winthrop University poll. Overall, a plurality thinks they should remain. There is little agreement about how, or whether, to contextualize them.

Meanwhile, majorities of both black and white Americans agree that race relations in the U.S. are worsening, according to the Winthrop survey.

That raises the stakes for questions about monuments being pondered in places like Decatur, Georgia; Savannah, Georgia; Norfolk, Virginia; and Richmond, Virginia. Richmond's Monument Avenue features famous statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The city's Valentine Museum is currently exhibiting dozens of conceptual drawings of what could be done with the statues, including one idea to bury them to their heads.

"The question for us has become, what does contextualization really mean?" says Bill Martin, the museum's director. "And that becomes a jumping-off point for a conversation that needs to happen."

Two years ago, in Charlottesville, a blue ribbon committee's decision to remove a Robert E. Lee statue sparked the "Unite the Right" rally. It devolved into a riot and street fight that left dozens injured and one dead.

The national tragedy at Charlottesville made clear to many Americans that the nation's legacy of white supremacy had burst into the present, and that white supremacists looked at Confederate statues as symbols of their ideology.

As newspaper reporters flocked to the city, religion professor Jalane Schmidt began holding informal tours of the statuary. The tour continues on a monthly basis, drawing upwards of 100 people at a time.

Ms. Schmidt says she didn't realize until after she began researching that over half of the residents of Albemarle County, where Charlottesville is located, were African Americans the year the Lee statue went up. And her research showed that its installation had little to do with commemoration of soldiers, and much to do with a "lost cause mythology" that advocated a national white brotherhood to thwart the political power of black Americans.

"These statues of metal look like mute monuments, but as we found out they are distilled hatred," says Ms. Schmidt. "They are sending a message of complete disregard for the humanity of black people."

Just a few miles from the Peace Monument in Atlanta is "the Lion of the Confederacy," a stone representation of a lion in repose, clutching a Confederate battle flag. The sleeping royal feline guards hundreds of slain Confederates, including an ancestor of Martin O'Toole's.

Mr. O'Toole is a former newspaper editor, an amateur historian, and a spokesman for the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Last week, he made his first visit to the "Lion" monument after a contextual plaque was added.

Armed with a camera to document the changes, he immediately spots what he thinks is a mistake. A title says "Lion of Atlanta." The statue is actually called the "Lion of the Confederacy," Mr. O'Toole says.

He notes that Georgia nearly undermined the Confederacy as its key leaders backed national unity in the 1850s. So what happened? News in the South that church bells had pealed in New England in support of abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry meant that sectional disputes had morphed into "a dangerous moment for Southerners," says Mr. O'Toole. "They were suddenly afraid for their lives. They had to fight."

But even as he quibbles with the Lion's new explainer, he notes, "I'm OK with the panels. They are mostly fact-based and within the law. I just say thanks to the legislature for passing a law to make sure the Lion is still here. Or else it most assuredly would be gone."

Atlanta's confederate statues will stay, at least for now. But all around them, the conversation has shifted, and history, for many, suddenly seems alive - evoking both danger and hope.

"What is important is that these new panels are not permanent," says Mr. Hale, as park-goers gather to read the new panels. "We can change the words. We can add more panels. But that's the point. These statues are no longer static. They are now evolving."

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The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?

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States are debating how to put Confederate statues in historical context - a reminder their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?Confederate statues in context: The future of America's past?

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C-August 13, 2017, it hasn't recently been updated
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A multi-ethnic democracy requires grappling honestly with the past-and recognizing the symbols of the Confederacy for what they are.

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

On Saturday in Charlottesville, a rally in defense of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned into a reenactment of the cause he led-white supremacists marching behind the Confederate battle flag, their opponents left injured or dead on the ground.

But like Lee's soldiers, today's defenders of white supremacy are fighting for a losing cause, a defeat that their violence will only serve to make deeper and more lasting than it otherwise would have been. Across the United States, the statues are starting to topple, the streets renamed, the memorials removed. These visible inscriptions of white supremacy into the American landscape are being erased.

In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu recently hauled down three public monuments to the Confederacy and to white supremacy. "These statues were a part of ... terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone's lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city," he explained. In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington responded to Charlottesville by accelerating his efforts to move statues of two Confederate leaders from the courthouse lawn to a public park. This was the rising tide of change that the Charlottesville rally hoped to stem.

As of August 2016, there were still more than 1,500 public commemorations of the Confederacy, even excluding the battlefields and cemeteries: 718 monuments and statutes still stood, and 109 public schools, 80 counties and cities, and 10 U.S. military bases bore the names of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate icons, according to a tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than 200 of these were in Virginia alone.

And one sits in the center of Charlottesville. It was commissioned exactly 100 years ago, a gift to the city from a local philanthropist, to honor his parents with a physical incarnation of Southern ideals. But the statue was hardly the only contemporary effort to enshrine and defend these ideals. As it was being commissioned, sculpted, and erected, the second Ku Klux Klan was surging through the country. In Charlottesville, the local Klan gave $1,000 to the University of Virginia's Centennial Endowment Fund in 1921, funds it gratefully received; there was a second Klan chapter for the students on campus.

The statue stands 26-feet tall, despite its oddly small pedestal. "Let it stay that way," urged a speaker at its dedication. "The planet as a pedestal would be too small for Robert Edward Lee." It was unveiled in 1924, as the conventions of the Confederate Veterans and Sons of Confederate Veterans met, with "the greatest procession that ever threaded its way through the streets of Charlottesville." The Boy Scouts policed the route; the National Guard and governor marched; the president, board, faculty, and students of the university joined in. The man who introduced the ceremonies praised the "deathless devotion" of the veterans, who had fought "at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg," and now worked "to keep the record of Confederate heroism free from the stain of calumny!"

It was less a dedication than a canonization. The master of ceremonies called Lee "the greatest man who ever lived." The president of Washington and Lee proclaimed him "a Christian saint." Lee, he explained, embodied "the moral greatness of the Old South," with its "unusual combination of manly courage and womanly tenderness, its habitual tenderness toward the weak and helpless." (When three slaves escaped, Lee had them tied to posts and whipped -50 lashes for the men, 20 for the woman-and then had their backs washed with stinging brine.)

His defenders today insist that Lee's heroism lay not least in his laying down his sword when the war was done, deciding to "promote harmony once he recognized defeat." The speakers at the dedication likewise stressed Lee's role as a peacemaker; one went so far as to imagine the statute depicted "not the lurid splendor of the battlefield," but instead, Lee riding to Lexington to begin his tenure as a university president.

Yet this is not what the statue depicts. Not this one, nor the others. Where are the statues of Lee seated at Appomattox, signing the terms of that surrender? Where are the marbles and bronzes of Lee the college president, wearing civilian clothes, ensconced behind a desk piled high with paperwork? Why is this peacemaker always immortalized girded for war?

Perhaps it's because this, too, is largely myth, as my colleague Adam Serwer has so ably documented. Grant excoriated Lee for "setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized." And the reconciliation he offered was between whites-it pointedly excluded those he had held as property, whose freedom the war secured, but whose equality he bitterly contested.

Lee himself, after the war, encouraged a friend to banish the 90 newly freed women, children, and old men working on his plantation. The government could pay for their care, Lee advised; better to replace them with white labor. "I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving." That is the harmony Lee promoted.

But the Lee memorialized in Charlottesville isn't even the conciliator of myth. He's attired in uniform, riding his horse. He's the general who took an invading army north into Pennsylvania in 1863, in defense of a slave society. And not merely in the abstract. Lee's army was ordered to respect white property, but chose to regard the blacks it encountered as contraband-to be seized and returned to the South, whether born free, manumitted, or escaped. The army seized scores of their fellow Americans as slaves, actions sanctioned at the highest level of command; it took as many as a thousand back to Virginia. Those actions are among the "calumnies" that speakers at the statue's dedication praised the veterans of Gettysburg for contesting.

"Some of the colored people who were raised here were taken along," wrote Rachel Cormany in Chambersburg. "I sat on the front step as they were driven by just as we would drive cattle." Women, children, and infants alike were marched off to slavery. Philip Schaff, a prominent theologian, watched as Lee's army seized neighbors born and raised in the town. "One, Sam Brooks, split many a cord of wood for me." He appealed to the conscience of one of their captors; he insisted he felt "comfortable," because they were merely reclaiming stolen property.

Lee's army, retreating in defeat, released some, but most were hauled South to the auction block. For the crime of refusing to cross back to Virginia, one boy was horribly mutilated, doused in turpentine, his genitals sliced off, and left to die in a barn by his Confederate captors. If there is no evidence that Lee, the living embodiment of womanly tenderness, sanctioned such crimes, neither is there evidence he acted to stop them. Nor was the Gettysburg campaign an anomaly; slave raids were a persistent feature of Confederate campaigns out of Virginia. At the Battle of the Crater, Lee's army slaughtered black prisoners; one soldier lamented that some survived because "we could not kill them as fast as they [passed] us." This is what the uniform Lee wore represented; this is what the army he commanded did; this is the pose in which he is immortalized in the center of Charlottesville.

There is a reason why statues of Confederate generals are still powerful political symbols; a reason why a candidate came a hair's breadth from securing the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Virginia by campaigning to preserve them. The statues in public squares, the names on street signs, the generals honored with military bases-these are the ways in which we, as a society, tell each other what we value, and build the common heritage around which we construct a nation.

The white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville saw this perhaps more clearly than the rest of us. They understood the stakes of what they were defending. They knew that Lee was honored not for making peace per se, but for defending a society built upon white supremacy-first by taking up arms, and then when the war was lost, by laying them down in such a way as to preserve what he could.

On Saturday, President Trump told Americans they "must be united" and "condemn all that hate stands for." He deplored the "violence on many sides." A century before, such remarks would have been heartily applauded in Charlottesville. At the statue's dedication, the keynote speaker deplored the violence of the Civil War, and praised Lee for his efforts at "reunion and reconciliation," and for forging a nation with "hearts unspoiled by hate."

The myth of reunion was built around this understanding, that the nation should treat both sides in a war that killed three-quarters of a million Americans as equal, or at least not inquire too closely into the merits of each cause. And that unity would come not from honestly grappling with events, but from studiously ignoring injustice, and condemning those who oppose it as hateful.

But the swift backlash against the president's remarks by leaders of his own party and leading figures of his own administration signaled that the United States of 2017 is not the same nation it was in 1924. Republicans and Democrats alike saw the white nationalists in the streets of Charlottesville for what they were, and rejected their vision of a nation built on white supremacism.

This is why the city council of Charlottesville voted, a century after it was commissioned, to remove the statue of Robert Edward Lee.

And ultimately, it is why the others will come down, too. The statues will be moved, the streets renamed, and the military bases will honor patriots who fought for their country and not against it. Because a century and a half after Reconstruction began, America is still working on the project of constructing a more equal society, and reinvesting in the experiment of a multi-ethnic democracy.

The white nationalists in Charlottesville hoped to halt this project. Instead, they have simply given it fiercer, redoubled urgency.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Yoni Appelbaum is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Ideas section.

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A multi-ethnic democracy requires grappling honestly with the past-and recognizing the symbols of the Confederacy for what they are. On Saturday in Charlottesville, a rally in defense of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned into a reenactment of the cause he led-white supremacists marching behind the Confederate battle flag, their opponents left injured or dead on the ground.

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R-It is a civil War statue
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C-May 17, 2017, it hasn't recently been updated.
R-It disagrees with my claim
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Statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, which was recently taken down in New Orleans.

Recent controversies over the removal of public Confederate monuments in New Orleans and Charlottesville, Virginia have rekindled debate over how we should deal with the historic legacy of the Confederacy. I agree with conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby, libertarian Ronald Bailey, and others who make the case for removal.

The issue comes down to this simple proposition: the government should not honor people whose principal claim to fame is that they fought a bloody war in defense of the evil institution of slavery. Ultimately, the case for removing Confederate monuments is the same as the case for removing the Confederate flag from public spaces of honor, and the case for renaming sites such as the Jefferson Davis Highway.

You don't have to take my word for the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause, or even the word of the overwhelming majority of Civil War historians. Take that of Confederate President Jefferson Davis himself, who unequivocally stated in 1861 that the cause of his state's secession was that "she had heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races." Or that of Davis's vice president, Alexander Stephens, who famously avowed that "slavery . . . was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution" and that protecting it was the "cornerstone" of the new Confederate government. Consider also the Southern states' official statements outlining their reasons for secession, which focus on slavery far more than any other issue. Mississippi's statement minced no words on the subject:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.... These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union...

The Confederacy cannot even be justified on the theory that the majority of the people in any state or region have a right to secede for any reason they want. As John Stuart Mill pointed out at the time, southern secession lacked majority support in any state, once you recognize that blacks count as people too, and were a part of the relevant population whose consent secessionists had an obligation to secure. African-Americans were some 40% of the population of the seceding states; it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority opposed secession. Between blacks and the substantial minority of southern whites who wanted to stay in the Union, it is likely that secessionists did not enjoy majority support in any state.

Despite the claims of some critics, removing Confederate monuments does not require any "whitewashing" of history. No one claims that we should erase the Confederacy and its leaders from the historical record. Far from it. We should certainly remember them and continue to study their history. We just should not honor them.

Perhaps some otherwise objectionable monuments should remain because they have great artistic or historical importance. Others can appropriately be displayed in museums and other facilities whose purpose is facilitating research and historical understanding, rather than bestowing honor. The same point applies to the use of Confederate flags in such settings as maps, boardgames, historical reenactments, and the like. The goal is not to literally remove all signs of the Confederacy, but to stop publicly honoring it and its leaders.

As Bailey and Jacoby note, it would be wrong to disturb Confederate cemeteries and other similar facilities whose purpose is to commemorate and lament the dead, rather than their deeds and the cause they fought for. Likewise, the government should not suppress the use of Confederate symbols and monuments by private organizations, including those that wrongheadedly seek to defend the Confederacy and its legacy. They are entitled to freedom of speech, no less than advocates of other causes. The state should not endorse such advocacy, but it also should not persecute it.

Some try to justify continuing to honor Confederates because we honor many other historical figures who committed various moral wrongs. For example, many of the Founding Fathers also owned slaves, just like many leading Confederates did. But the Founders deserve commemoration because their complicity in slavery was outweighed by other, more positive achievements, such as establishing the Constitution. By contrast, leading a war in defense of slavery was by far the most important historical legacy of Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederate leaders. If not for secession and Civil War, few would remember them today.

The US is far from the only nation that struggles with such issues. Post-communist states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere have removed many communist monuments. Germany and Italy have removed monuments to the Nazis and Fascists. Communism, Nazism, fascism, and slavery should all remain part of our historical memory. But we should not honor the regimes and leaders who promoted these evils.

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Opinion | The case for taking down Confederate monuments

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Recent controversies over the removal of public Confederate monuments in New Orleans and Charlottesville, Virginia have rekindled debate over how we should deal with the historic legacy of the Confederacy. I agree with conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby, libertarian Ronald Bailey, and others who make the case for removal.

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New Orleans is the latest city to start taking down historical but controversial monuments that many say celebrate slavery and the Confederacy. Angry opponents see the move as suppressing or rewriting history in the service of political correctness. William Brangham talks to Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute and Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:
Last week in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana Statehouse passed HB-71, which would require a referendum before any military monument could be renamed or removed. In a show of defiance, black caucus members walked out after vote.

Meanwhile last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, torch-bearing protesters, including white nationalist Richard Spencer, marched against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue there.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counts more than 700 Confederate monuments and statues on public lands across the country. The vast majority of those are in the South.

So, is this the right approach for dealing with the darker sides of U.S. history?

I'm joined now by two men who've wrestled with this very question. Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He's helping build a national monument to the victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama. And Walter Isaacson is a historian and writer and president of the Aspen Institute.

Welcome to you both.

Walter, I would like to start with you first.

You are a native of New Orleans. You were there when they are bringing Robert E. Lee down off his pedestal today. What do you make of the city's moves?

BRYAN STEVENSON, Founder, Equal Justice Initiative:
Well, I think it's also very long overdue and a really important step for one of America's great cities that wants to be open and inviting to all the people of the world.

And I think this legacy of racial inequality and segregation has really put a cloud over New Orleans. And these statues and monuments have reflected that cloud more powerfully than anything.

These totems are made of concrete and steel and bronze, but they have been screaming at African-Americans for decades. And what they have been screaming is this narrative of racial difference, this history of white supremacy.

So, I think this is long overdue. And part of that has to do with the legacy. I don't the great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude and forced labor. I think the real evil of American slavery was this narrative of racial difference we created, the ideology white supremacy that we made up. We said black people are different than white people. They're not fully human.

Our courts held that black people were only three-fifths human. And our 13th Amendment dealt with involuntary servitude and forced labor, but it didn't deal with this ideology of white supremacy.

And because of that, I don't think slavery ended in 1865. I think it just evolved. And the proof of that was the erection of these narratives or these monuments and totems, which came after a violent resistance, as Walter said, to racial equality.

And they have been there for decades screaming that that narrative of racial difference, that resistance to the end of emancipation, to integration is something worth honoring. And I think that has to change if we're going to be a country that makes progress in dealing with racial inequality.

WALTER ISAACSON:
I would agree that it was good to have the discussion, too, Bryan, which helped this city.

When I was first asked to be on the Tricentennial Commission down here, Wynton Marsalis said, I will do it with you if we take down Robert E. Lee.

And I said, well, I never paid much attention to Robert E. Lee when you go around Lee Circle. And Wynton said, I did. We did.

And that helped us do a dialogue down here, which now is pretty complete.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:
But, Walter, you heard Bryan say that they were screaming, that these statues were screaming about inequality and white superiority.

There's also a great deal of screaming, the people who are furious that these monuments are coming down. How is a mayor or a governor anywhere in the country supposed to wrestle with that very real boiling anger over these exact moves?

WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, I think what happened here in New Orleans is, we spent a lot of time talking about it, and the anger, especially among local citizens, receded.

I think there's a willingness now to put this behind. As I said, I just came from Lee Circle. There is a brass band there playing the national anthem.

I think that, once we had this catharsis of talking about it, there were people who protested the monuments coming down, but they were all outsiders who had come in from these weird groups around the country.

In New Orleans right now, it was a daytime, very peaceful thing to get this monument down, and I think the whole process of talking it through, and realizing that we don't need to put the Confederacy on a pedestal in New Orleans, which wasn't even part of the Civil War, really.

BRYAN STEVENSON:
Well, I think it's important to have a conversation about what we honor and why.

But I think there's a huge difference between Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and people who were the architects and defenders of slavery, people who were actually considered traitors and treasonous, many of whom thought should be hanged after the Civil War.

And I think it's just a radical difference between what we see in the American South. We have states, like my state of Alabama, where Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday, where Jefferson Davis' birthday is a state holiday. That's very far away from the conversations that we're having in other parts of the country.

And I think it does matter. We talk about memorials a lot. We have a 9/11 Memorial in this country because what happened on 9/11 was significant to the nation, to its history, to its culture. And we believe in the power of memorials to say something about who we are.

That doesn't mean that, if a nation put up a statue honoring Osama bin Laden, we would think that that is acceptable. We would be absolutely provoked by that.

And so there is a way to think about what we honor that reflects who we are, what we think is significant. The greatest person, the most influential person of the 20th century was arguably Adolf Hitler. That doesn't mean that there should be statues of him in Germany. We would be very provoked by that.

And so I do think we have to ask hard questions. And I think, on the question of the Confederacy and the architects and defenders of white supremacy, symbols of resistance to integration, there should be no debate. We cannot move forward if we actually think there is something acceptable about honoring that legacy.

WALTER ISAACSON:
You know, William, all slopes are slippery. That's why you try to find a moral footing.

Bryan got it right. You say, what was the purpose of this memorial? We have a memorial in this city right behind me - look over my shoulder - to Andrew Jackson. That's because it was put up in 1840. In the square where Jackson's statue is, that's where he mustered the troops to win the Battle of New Orleans. So, that memorial is there to honor that.

He was a bad slave owner. He had a lot wrong with him. But you have to say, is this a symbol of white supremacy and Confederacy and traitorousness, or is it because he won the Battle of New Orleans?

People who say things are slippery slopes, of course they are slippery slopes. That's why you have moral arguments to say, where do I put my footing, where do I try to draw the line?

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Why Confederate monuments are coming down

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New Orleans is the latest city to start taking down historical but controversial monuments that many say celebrate slavery and the Confederacy. Angry opponents see the move as suppressing or rewriting history in the service of political correctness. William Brangham talks to Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute and Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.

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