Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities,

the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Ed Ayers.

I'm Brian Ballow.

I'm Nathan Connolly.

Each week, Brian, Ed, our colleague, Joanne Freeman and I, all historians, take a topic and explore its history.

Now Brian, Nathan, let me take you back to 1890 in Richmond, Virginia.

A large bronze statue of Confederate General Robert Lee had just arrived from France.

Now this was 25 years after the end of the Civil War.

The statue was transported on a boat up to James River.

And then was hauled to the location and in the kind of ironies that you can only find in the south,

mostly hauled by now freed African-American workers who are the major laborers in the city of Richmond.

This is historian Marien McInnes.

She says the statue's arrival caused a real stir.

And the day of the unveiling was an enormous event in Richmond.

The capital of the Confederacy, tens of thousands of former Confederate soldiers returned to the city,

dressed in their uniforms.

There were parties and parades and speeches and events that consumed the city.

Estimates were that more than 150,000 came to Richmond for the event.

In the decades that followed, more monuments appeared on what is now called Monument Avenue.

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