The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem.

The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem. By John M. Coski. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 401. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-674-01983-0; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01722-6.)

I live and work in the northern English city of Sheffield. A few years ago cabs belonging to a new taxi firm, the Confederate Car Company, appeared on its streets sporting the battle flag of the defeated South. How was one to read this puzzling development? As a testimony to the city's most famous Victorian politician, John A. Roebuck, a staunch supporter of the southern struggle for independence in the 1860s? Or perhaps, more prosaically, as evidence of the owner's fondness for country music? A less palatable but likelier explanation, given the predominance of black Asian drivers in Sheffield's lucrative taxi business and the fact that the new cabs were painted a gleaming white and driven solely by Caucasians, is that the Confederate Car Company was keen to purvey a relatively subtle message (subtle, that is, in the context of South Yorkshire) of racial defiance. Its determination to flaunt an emblem that many African Americans equate with the swastika highlighted the global appeal of an ostensibly redundant symbol, the ambiguity of its meaning, and the sometimes insidious uses to which it can be put.

John M. Coski has written the first full published assessment of the changing role played by the Confederate battle flag in American history. It is a thoughtful, methodical account of how the starred blue diagonal Cross of St. Andrew on a red field eventually came to be regarded as the preeminent symbol of the would-be southern nation, favored by Confederate soldiers and noncombatants alike over rival banners like the Stars and Bars that were deemed to be excessively derivative of the Union's Old Glory. Coski describes skillfully how, after Appomattox, the battle flag was transformed into the principal insignia of the Lost Cause by southern heritage groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. He argues convincingly that use of the emblem was relatively infrequent and uncontroversial until it was adopted in semiofficial fashion by the 1948 Dixiecrat convention in Birmingham, Alabama. Thereafter the battle flag was associated closely in the public mind with the fight against integration--a linkage responsible for the so-called flag wars of recent years, the diversity and complexity of which Coski details with admirable clarity and fair-mindedness.

As historian and library director at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, Coski has a very clear personal agenda for this book. His ambition is to convince opponents and supporters of the battle flag to engage constructively with one another. Whereas the latter, he believes, must understand why blacks find this quintessentially American emblem so hateful, the former should do more to comprehend the views of those southern whites for whom the flag epitomizes the courage and integrity of their Confederate forebears. Given that recent flag debates in states like Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi have often generated more heat than light, this viewpoint seems entirely reasonable. However, Coski's balanced analysis does occasionally highlight the danger of this approach. For example, while he correctly acknowledges the battle flag's close association with slavery and racism, his easy acceptance of the stock neo-Confederate retort that racism was rife throughout antebellum America ignores the critical point that white supremacism was contested in the North but not the South and that the ensuing Civil War had a demonstrably liberalizing impact on undeniably prejudiced northerners like Abraham Lincoln. Professional historians do have a duty to engage with the people who fund and support institutions like the Museum of the Confederacy. But even in these postmodern times they also have a responsibility not to concede too much in the effort to draw them into a dialogue.

ROBERT COOK

University of Sheffield