“Oh, home of tears, but let her bear this blazoned to the end of time: No nation rose so white and fair, none fell so pure of crime.” So reads the stanza from a poem popular in the South during the Civil War engraved on a Confederate soldier statue unveiled in 1911 on the lawn of the Cooke County courthouse in Gainesville, Texas (Figure 1). It is one of two Confederate statues long on display in the city of some 16,000 some ninety miles north of Dallas. This larger-than-life soldier, standing high upon a column, towers over an important public space. It is among many Confederate monuments that long occupied public spaces across the United States, often with little local debate, despite their often white-supremacist inscriptions.

“哦，眼泪之家，但让她忍受这刻在时间的尽头：没有一个国家如此白皙和公平，没有一个国家如此纯洁的犯罪。” 因此，阅读内战期间在南方流行的一首诗中的诗节，这首诗刻在 1911 年在德克萨斯州盖恩斯维尔库克县法院的草坪上揭幕的邦联士兵雕像上（图 1）。它是达拉斯以北约 90 英里、人口约 16,000 人的城市中长期展出的两座邦联雕像之一。这位超凡脱俗的士兵，高高地站在一根柱子上，耸立在一个重要的公共空间之上。它是长期占据美国公共空间的许多同盟纪念碑之一，尽管它们经常有白人至上主义的铭文，但通常很少有地方辩论。