Nearly 100 Confederate Monuments Were Toppled Last Year. What Happened to Them?

It’s been a long time since I sat in an American history class, but what I remember of my education in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1980s and ’90s is how much of it was not fact, but myth.

I was taught that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights—a concept that seemed plausibly defensible to a kid—and that “our side” had its own heroes and its own stories worth remembering. Several of my relatives who live in north Florida still fly the Confederate flag on their boats and paste...