Though I greatly appreciate Ian’s thoughts on the Confederate battle flag, I believe that official displays of the flag should end, for two reasons that immediately come to mind. One admittedly sentimental reason is that the nationalist in me would much prefer that we celebrate the roughly 200,000 southerners, more than 90,000 of whom were black, who fought for the Union rather than those who fought against it, a point that Josh Gelernter raised several months ago. But the other reason is that the use of Confederate symbols has gone through a number of different phases since the end of the Civil War, and the revival of these symbols that began in the late 1940s was about more than paying tribute to the Confederate war dead. Back in 2000, Georgia’s state government commissioned an inquiry into the history of Georgia’s state flag. The final product is a fascinating document, and though I’m sure that it does not offer the last word on the subject, I found it worthwhile.