| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem. By John M. Coski. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2005. xiv, 401 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01722-6.)
John M. Coski has given us a well-researched, clearly written history of the Confederate battle flag and how it became "America's most embattled emblem." Coski begins with the wartime emergence and postbellum enshrinement of the white-starred, blue St. Andrew's cross on a red field as the hallowed symbol not so much of a separate nation-state as of a southern white cause arguably more unifying and compelling after the Confederacy was destroyed than before it was created.	1
Although he documents the flag's investiture as the primary icon of the Lost Cause, unlike some recent commentators, Coski does not always see a clear connection between the installation of Confederate symbols on the banners of several states and the move at the end of the nineteenth century to make white supremacy a matter of law as well as custom and coercion. He also points out that despite the sorry company the Rebel banner has kept in recent years, until the Ku Klux Klan's (KKK) post-1945 resurgence amid the growing regional and national rumble over race, the Kluxers generally preferred to wrap themselves in the stars and stripes. In fact, Coski seems to suggest that the widespread resonance of the Confederate flag as the ensign of white supremacy largely dates back only to 1948, when the revolting Dixiecrats made it a popular symbol of southern white opposition to growing northern pressure for racial reform.	. . .

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