Half Hour of Heterodoxy

Half Hour of Heterodoxy


86. Adam Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory

May 20, 2020

Adam Domby is my guest today. He’s a history professor at the College of Charleston and we’ll
be talking about his research on the statue of Silent Sam at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.


That statue commemorated a Confederate soldier and was erected at a main university
entrance in 1913. When Domby was a student at Chapel Hill in the early 2010s, he uncovered
the dedication speech of the statue showing its connection to White supremacy. The statue
was pulled down by activists in 2018 and there has been an ongoing legal dispute over what to
do with the statue.


I’ll also be talking about Adam’s new book The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory published in February this year, which is partially about the
lies told by the people who sponsored this statue but mainly about lies told about North
Carolina’s history after the Civil War and the function of those lies.


You can follow Adam on twitter @AdamHDomby.