The southern writer Robert Penn Warren claimed that the Civil War was the United States’ ‘only “felt” history – history lived in the national imagination’. If ongoing debates about the management of Confederate statuary teach us anything, it is that its reverberations continue to be felt by Americans today. The grip of the Civil War certainly seems to have tightened in recent years as the rise of white supremacist violence and the efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement to challenge systemic racism remind us that, as Cody Marrs puts it, the Civil War is an ‘unsettled conflict that will continue to be refought as long as American civilization exists’.