Rice University historian available to discuss Confederate flag

EXPERT ALERT

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Rice University historian available to discuss Confederate flag

HOUSTON – (July 9, 2015) – Caleb McDaniel, associate professor of history at Rice University, is available to comment on the South Carolina Legislature’s historic vote this morning to take the Confederate flag down from its statehouse.

Photo courtesy Rice University

McDaniel is also available to discuss the ongoing debate in Texas about Civil War era monuments and the latest debate about how the Civil War is taught in state textbooks. McDaniel is quoted in a front-page story in today’s Houston Chronicle, “Civil War material in textbooks under fire.”

From the Houston Chronicle: “New Texas textbooks, tailored to state standards that downplay the role of slavery in the Civil War and omit mentions of Jim Crow laws or the Ku Klux Klan, are drawing criticism again as the nation grapples with its racial history,” according to the story’s author, Benjamin Wermund.

According to McDaniel, “Americans are still grappling with the memory of the Civil War 150 years after it ended, because the institution that caused the war — slavery — had consequences that persist into the present,” said. “The symbols of the Confederacy that still exist in Southern public spaces were put there at a time when white Southerners had the power to control the way the Southern past was represented. In many places, the balance of political power still favors those who favor honoring the Confederacy, but as South Carolina’s historic vote shows, that is beginning to change.”

McDaniel is also the author of “The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform” (LSU Press May 2013). The book was selected for the 2014 Merle Curti Award for best book in American intellectual history and a James H. Broussard First Book Prize from SHEAR.

Rice University has a VideoLink ReadyCam TV interview studio. ReadyCam is capable of transmitting broadcast-quality standard-definition and high-definition video directly to all news media organizations around the world 24/7. For more information or to schedule an interview with McDaniel, contact David Ruth, director of national media and broadcast media at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

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