ABSTRACT
Place-based learning integrates classroom learning and local, real-world experiences in a complementary manner to achieve student learning goals. Many Confederate statues like that of Lee in Charlottesville do not date to the Civil War, but to an era in the early twentieth century when the descendants of Civil War veterans sought to cast the Confederacy’s loss in more positive terms. Most significantly, the naming convention makes the Civil War and Confederacy central to Southern identity and experience, an approach that, in uncritical hands, can lead to the excesses of the lost cause described previously. From the end of Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century, to the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, to the Charlottesville violence of 2017, this lost cause identity motivated many of the racist atrocities of the South.
