Episode overview
Join me and historian Kevin Levin for a wide-ranging conversation about public memory, Confederate monuments, the Lost Cause narrative, and why controlling how people remember the past has always been a political act.
Along the way, the Allman Brothers Band make an inevitable — and illuminating — appearance.
Our crossroads
Kevin and I are both non-traditional historians who arrived at our research area from unexpected angles and built public audiences for serious scholarship outside academic silos. We share a foundational belief that memory—not just history—is the battlefield that matters, and that controlling how people remember the past is always a political act. We’re both obsessive about primary sources, whether that’s Kevin dismantling the Black Confederate myth through Confederate government records or me tracking a single newspaper clipping about Duane Allman across three decades. And perhaps most personally, we both came to a reckoning with the Lost Cause—me through my grandmother’s Reconstruction stories and my father’s Kappa Alpha hero worship of Lee, Kevin through a German wife who looked at Richmond’s Monument Avenue and simply asked, “What exactly is going on here?”
The conversation
The blogosphere that was. The early 2000s Civil War blogosphere and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic blog and what we’ve lost as social media replaced reasoned dialogue with talking points, and why good-faith conversation is worth protecting.
Memory vs. history. The distinction that runs through the whole episode: history is the past; memory is how we grapple with it. Memory is generational, emotional, and always in motion. A student coming-of-age through Black Lives Matter filters the Civil War differently than a grandparent shaped by Gone with the Wind — and both reactions make complete historical sense.
The Lost Cause, explained. For listeners new to the term: the Lost Cause is the post-Civil War reframing of the Confederacy’s defeat as a noble, principled stand against industrial aggression — not a war fought to preserve slavery. We trace its roots and show how it was deliberately engineered, generation by generation, through monuments, textbooks, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The monument landscape and how it changed. Kevin traces the evolution of Confederate monuments from cemetery markers (genuine grief) to courthouse squares and prominent boulevards (deliberate civic messaging). He explains why the placement and dedication language of early 20th-century monuments make their purpose unmistakable — and reflects on the stunning pace of change after the 2015 Charleston massacre and the 2020 murder of George Floyd, including his own Smithsonian piece incorrectly predicting Richmond’s Monument Avenue would stand.
The Allman Brothers and the Confederate flag. I drop receipts: the band’s official 1974 summer tour poster featuring Robert E. Lee riding through the Confederate battle flag — at a moment when one-third of the band was Black. We unpack what that tells us about the pervasive success of the Lost Cause: that even an integrated, culturally progressive band raised in Southern schools absorbed the flag as a symbol of rebel identity, not white supremacy — even its use in massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.
States’ rights — and the argument-ender. States’ rights in the service of what, exactly? When Northern states passed laws against federal fugitive slave enforcement, Southern states insisted on federal intervention. Moreover, as Kevin shows, the Confederacy was the most aggressive wielder of federal power in American history, drafting soldiers and impressing crops, livestock, and enslaved labor.
Black Confederates: the myth, the reality. Kevin’s book addresses this directly. The short answer: the Confederate Congress did not authorize the enlistment of enslaved men as soldiers until March 13, 1865 — weeks before the war ended. A small number paraded in Richmond. They were housed in a jail cell. They were never given weapons. The myth of a significant Black Confederate fighting force is, as Bob puts it, “a made-up construct” — and its function is to obscure what the Confederate government actually did between 1861 and 1865: wage war to preserve slavery.
What Germany can teach us. Kevin’s German wife has long noted, with pointed curiosity, that Americans have monuments to people who tried to establish an independent slaveholding republic. Bob reflects on a recent trip to Berlin — walking the line of the wall, standing in a city that has chosen to mark its shame everywhere, openly. Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans gets a mention as a comparative framework Americans would do well to engage with.
The federal assault on public history. We are clear that what the current administration is doing to the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, and federal funding for museums and history is unprecedented. There is no comparable moment from either party. This is the same impulse that drove the United Daughters of the Confederacy: if you can shape how people remember the past, you can shape how they see themselves — and what they’ll accept — in the present.
Why difficult history matters. A conversation-closing reflection on why studying the painful parts of the American past is not a political act but a human one. History, both agree, is their Zen — the place where ego falls away and you find yourself a small speck in something much larger and more humbling than your own moment.
Books & resources mentioned
Bob Beatty, Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505
Kevin Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
Hilary N. Green, Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War (Fordham University Press, 2025)
John Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Harvard University Press, 2005)
Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)
Tim Galsworthy, The Republican House Divided: Civil War Memory, Civil Rights, and the Transformation of the GOP (University of South Carolina Press, 2025)
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 1955)
Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000)
Jim Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (The New Press, 1995) and Lies Across America (The New Press, 1999)
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History (W.W. Norton, 2004)
Thanks to Kevin
Here’s his blurb for Play All Night on Amazon
“Play All Night! is more than just a history book. It is a love song to a band that has brought great joy to generations of diehard fans. An entertaining and illuminating exploration of the music of Duane Allman, the Allman Brothers Band, and the story behind the recording of one of the most iconic albums in rock history. This book was a pleasure to read.”—Kevin Levin, author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth
Kevin Levin is a historian, educator, and author based in Boston. He spent years in the classroom teaching the Civil War and its legacy, and continues teaching online at Kevin M. Levin/Civil War Memory. He is the author of numerous books https://cwmemory.com/books/.
Long Live the ABB is hosted by Bob Beatty. New episodes explore Southern music, history, and culture through the lens of the Allman Brothers Band and the world that made them.
PLAY ALL NIGHT! DUANE ALLMAN AND THE JOURNEY TO FILLMORE EAST
