As a graduate student at University of California Irvine, Patrick A. Testa wondered why there were Confederate monuments in Southern California. Now he knows the reason. Slaveholding Confederates settled in the area after the Civil War.
Testa, a political economist at Tulane University, is a co-author of a new study that shows how the migration of elite Southerners in the decades after the Civil War shaped parts of the western United States.