Karen Cox
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian of the American South and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of four books and the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal listed her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, as one of the top five books on the Lost Cause. A 2nd edition of her most recent book, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, was released in early 2026.
Karen has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME, Publishers Weekly, and Smithsonian Magazine. She appeared in Henry Louis Gates’s PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments through the lens of monument removal in New Orleans, and Ava DuVernay's new documentary 14th. She is currently working on a book titled Confederate Nation (St. Martin's Press, 2028) that examines how the Lost Cause, a post-Civil War southern mythology, reshaped American culture and politics.