Documented: Absence Of History

The spaces where bronze Confederates once stood.

- Christopher Bonanos

“I’M FROM CALIFORNIA,” Matthew Shain says, “and the Civil War was very academic to me.” That all changed when he traveled for the first time to New Orleans, where statues of generals and slaveholders stood all over town. Then the monuments started to vanish, as, over the past few years, cities and their governments belatedly realized that they had to reckon with the representations of white supremacists their civic forefathers had cast in bronze and zinc. And as the statues came off their pedestals&mdas