Journal Articles by Kevin Waite
California History, 2020
California once housed over a dozen monuments, memorials, and place-names honoring the Confederac... more California once housed over a dozen monuments, memorials, and place-names honoring the Confederacy, far more than any other state beyond the South. The list included schools and trees named for Robert E. Lee, mountaintops and highways for Jefferson Davis, and large memorials to Confederate soldiers in Hollywood and Orange County. Many of the monuments have been removed or renamed in the recent national reckoning with Confederate iconography. But for much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, they stood as totems to the "Lost Cause" in the American West. Despite a vast literature on the origins, evolution, and enduring influence of the Lost Cause myth, little is known about how this ideology impacted the political culture and physical space of the American West. This article explores the commemorative landscape of California to explain why a free state, far beyond the major military theaters of the Civil War, gave rise to such a vibrant Confederate culture in the twentieth century. California chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) carried out much of this commemorative work. They emerged in California shortly after the organization's founding in Tennessee in 1894 and, over the course of a century, emblazoned the Western map with salutes to a slaveholding rebellion. In the process, the UDC and other Confederate organizations triggered a continental struggle over Civil War memory that continues to this day.
Journal of the Civil War Era, 2016
Cultural and Social History, Volume 11, Issue 3, Sep 2014
Despite the popular aphorism, ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,’ his... more Despite the popular aphorism, ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,’ historians have been slow to appreciate the value Georgian elites vested in their public schools and public school sport. In fact, the stereotype of these schools as anarchic and pedagogically insignificant still endures. I argue that the schools of this period came to enjoy a growing popularity precisely because of their rough nature. Contemporaries praised the violence of both the dormitories and the playing fields as productive of vigorous, future leaders, capable of defending Britain in a world at war. Such rhetoric, I argue, anticipated the late Victorian cults of sport and manliness.
Other Publications by Kevin Waite
Well before provocateurs like Trump and Anne Coulter began spinning stories about criminal Latino... more Well before provocateurs like Trump and Anne Coulter began spinning stories about criminal Latino immigrants coming up from the south, it was Mexicans who very rightly fretted about American immigrants streaming down from the north. Historically, Mexico has lost far more land, power, and resources to American immigration than vice versa.
How a former California senator almost brought the Civil War to Mexico.
Long before today's Republicans made obstruction their raison d'etre, Gilded Age Democrats turned... more Long before today's Republicans made obstruction their raison d'etre, Gilded Age Democrats turned "No" into a political rallying cry, and, in the process, rolled back some of the era's most important social reforms.
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Journal Articles by Kevin Waite
Other Publications by Kevin Waite
Radio by Kevin Waite
Book Reviews by Kevin Waite