When I moved to northern Virginia in 2019, I was excited to live in a part of the country I had previously only visited. I’ve been a Civil War buff since childhood, and in the mid-1990s my family and I toured northern Virginia’s battlefields down to Richmond. A lot had changed in the intervening 23 years.
Over the past few decades, newcomers to Virginia like myself–both from elsewhere in the United States and foreign born immigrants–have flooded northern Virginia. The resulting wave of monument removals and renaming has erased the region’s Civil War commemorative landscape. The markers and monuments of native Southerners have been relegated to to dusty museum shelves, or simply disappeared.
This article is my attempt to make sense of this sweeping cultural change that is rapidly transforming Virginia right before my own eyes. Check it out:
What are your thoughts?