In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, monuments honouring white heroes of the Confederate States of America were erected along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. In 1995, a vociferous debate occurred in Richmond over a proposal to ‘integrate’ the Avenue, still considered to be the South’s grandest Confederate memorial site, with a statue of the late African American Richmond native, tennis star and human rights activist Arthur Ashe. While on the surface, the main issue in the debate was where to locate the Ashe statue, the underlying debate over Richmond’s symbolic landscape centred on issues of race relations, identity and power in Richmond at the end of the twentieth century.

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A debate has grown throughout the southeastern United States in the 1990s over the use of Confederate symbols. In Georgia, a vociferous fight took place in 1993 regarding a proposal to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. The flag issue is divisive because there is no one accepted meaning attached to the symbolism embodied in the Confederate battle emblem. This paper examines the flag debate in Georgia and concludes that (1) the Georgia state flag is an example of an icon that acts as a centrifugal force splitting apart the state's population rather than acting as a centripetal force, and (2) support for the current state flag is concentrated in white-majority legislative districts in the rural parts of the state and the suburbs surrounding Georgia's largest cities.

Abstract. In the early 1900s, U.S. state and Canadian provincial governments began to register automobiles and issue license plates to their owners. Within several decades of the first issuance of license plates, state and provincial governments began to use these plates for advertising purposes, such as promoting local economies and tourism. In recent decades, however, governments have used license plates to promote national identities and nationalist ideals. Using examples from the United States and Canada, I examine how governments have used such banal signifiers of place as license plates to craft and promote these identities and how drivers have contested that usage.

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