Blain Roberts is a professor of history at California State University, Fresno and the author of Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women. She is co-author of Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press), a book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere. Examining public rituals, controversial monuments, and whitewashed historical tourism, Denmark Vesey’s Garden tracks these two rival memories from the Civil War all the way to contemporary times, where two segregated tourism industries still reflect these opposing impressions of the past, exposing a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide. Denmark Vesey’s Garden joins the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting new interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.
