PE/PI Workshop: Jeff Jensen (NYU AD)

Jeff Jensen (NYU AD) will present his talk, "The Strategic Origins and Political Consequences of Post-Conflict Memorialization." Abstract: In this paper, we explore the causes and consequences of post-Civil War memorialization in the American South. Our paper is the first to systematically test the claim that Confederate monuments were constructed to honor the war dead; this test is made possible by the availability of new micro-level estimates of Civil War mortalities. We find no association between local wartime mortality and subsequent memorialization. Instead, we show that monuments were disproportionately built in counties with a higher share of enslaved residents in 1860. We also demonstrate that the presence of early monuments predicted greater white supremacist mobilization: more United Daughters of the Confederacy chapters in 1900-1917, more Ku Klux Klan chapters in the 1920s, and higher Democratic presidential vote shares through 1928. These findings suggest that monuments in the aftermath of conflict are built for strategic reasons, and that their presence has consequential effects on political behavior.