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Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Tyler Cowan, one of my favorite people in the whole world.

He has this great line. He says sometimes in the beginning of his episodes, he says,

this is the interview that I want to have, not the interview that you want to have.

And so I, as I was telling my guests today, am a huge civil war nerd. I am a adopted southerner.

I'm fascinated by American history. I'm fascinated by moral complexity.

You'll notice that's why my books are filled with stories of Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln and William to come to Sherman and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

So it's just that this is the sea that I swim in. I'm fascinated by it.

You know, I wrote my first book, Walking Up and Down, The Very Old City Streets of New Orleans, right in the streetcar work into Library Too Lane.

This is just a conversation I've been having and I've been fascinated with for a very long time.

My guest today, Connor Town O'Neill is the author of a new book, which I loved called Down Along with That Devils Bones,

a reckoning with monuments, memory, and the legacy of white supremacy. It's basically a book about

basic Connor studies, all these interesting Confederate statues, particularly monuments of Nathan Bedford Forest, all throughout the South.

He uses that as a story to tell sort of the struggle with the monstrosity of slavery, the Jim Crow, the moral dilemma and haunted past of American history.

And that's a thing I'm fascinated with, but you'll see not just for its own sake, but I think it teaches us a lot about who and how we struggle with complexity in nuance.

And as up Jensen Claire says that, you know, the things we don't want to understand because our salary depends on us, not understanding them.

So this is a great book. Connor is a producer, the NPR podcast White Lies, which is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

He's graduate from Vassar. He earned an MFA from the University of Alabama.

And he teaches now at Auburn University. It's a great book. You should check it out.

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