The Lost Cause myth emerged in the South following the Civil War as a romanticized framework for processing and memorializing the catastrophic defeat of the Confederacy. By the early twentieth century it had become a well-established, powerful ideology that was national, even international in scope. Through public monuments, gaudy rituals, popular novels and film, and even academic publications, the Lost Cause was able to exert a disproportionate influence on how white Americans remembered the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction and, crucially, how they thought about race in their own time.
W. E. B. Du Bois watched this myth take hold of the American imagination through his youth and in his early years as a scholar. Some of his earliest student writings, not least his doctoral thesis, presented a challenge to the myth as it was emerging. By the time the Lost Cause had achieved national prominence, so had Du Bois as editor of The Crisis, and he thundered against it in editorials and articles for a quarter of a century. His efforts to resist this white supremacist framing of American History reached a pinnacle of sorts with his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, but he would continue his efforts to challenge and discredit the Lost Cause until his death in 1963.
This lecture will describe how the myth of the Lost Cause became such a powerful force in the American socio-cultural landscape before detailing some of the many ways Du Bois challenged it in word and deed. It will argue that this clash of ideas gives us much to think about in the present and that Du Bois’s quest for truth and historical justice is as relevant in 2026 as it was at any point during his long life.
Speaker Bio
Adam Holmes is the Assistant Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is responsible for the Center’s events and outreach as well as its fellowship program which supports new research into the life and work of Du Bois.
Adam holds degrees in History and American Studies from Manchester University and Kings College London respectively. Prior to joining the Du Bois Center in 2018, Adam worked for three years for the National Literacy Trust, a UK-based charity aiming to improve the education and lives of children and adults in some of the country’s most underserved communities.