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, and the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments through the lens of monument removal in New Orleans. She is currently working on a book titled Confederate Nation that examines how the Lost Cause, a post-Civil War southern mythology, reshaped American culture and politics.