Karen L. Cox

Historian & Author

Karen L. Cox is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, an award-winning historian, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of four books and the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. She has an essay in the NYT bestseller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.

Dr. Cox has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Huffington Post. She has given dozens of media interviews in the U.S. and around the world, especially on the topic of Confederate monuments. She appeared in Henry Louis Gates’s PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Lucy Worsley’s American History’s Biggest Fibs for the BBC, and the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments through the lens of monument removal in New Orleans. Her current book in progress explores the Rhythm Club fire, a tragedy that took the lives of more than 200 African Americans in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1940. When it happened, it was the deadliest club fire in the history of the United States.