Following continued battles about the place of Confederate monuments in American society and public memory, this study explores the nuances of Civil War memory and apparent lack thereof in newspaper coverage of the initial construction and dedication of four Confederate monuments across geographic sections. Through discourse and narrative analyses of 258 articles published in seven U.S. newspapers in the 1890s and 1920s, this study examines how Lost Cause mythology and reconciliation strategy distorted memory of the Civil War away from fact and toward myth in order to promote economic and political advantage while marginalizing the reality of wartime atrocities and slavery. This study contends that newspaper coverage served as strategic sites where hegemonic narratives of equal valor and sectional reunion took precedence over historical memory, thus influencing remembrances of the Civil War.
