Matt Barbee’s book is out.
Race and Masculinity in Southern Memory: History of Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue, 1948–1996 was published by Rowan & Littlefield, and is available at all the usual (and maybe some unusual?) places.
Locating public memory as a central site in the contested imagination of communal belonging, this book examines the post-World War II history of Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue as a key symbolic location in the cultural politics and political culture of the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights eras. A New South-era network of memorials to leaders of the Confederacy, Monument Avenue has long stood as the spatial and artistic manifestation of the cultural values espoused through the ideology of the Lost Cause. This ideology enabled the continued cultural and political dominance of a patrician, white elite who ruled Virginia through a politics of paternalism. This paternalism assured white rule and rigid racial segregation but was effected without the overt violence and abuses commonly associated with the post-Reconstruction South.