ATLANTA — If you had visited Atlanta in the early 1960s, you would have found drinking fountains labeled “Colored” and “White.” Driving into the city from the airport today you pass signs for Ralph David Abernathy Freeway, Andrew Young International Boulevard, John Lewis Freedom Parkway. As in the country at large, there have been big changes.

How deep are the changes? Nationally, militant whiteness is out in the open again. Our president is trying to inscribe a color line across our southern border. So politically split are the citizens of Fort America that it sometimes feels like a new kind of civil war is brewing.

These tensions have played out symbolically in skirmishes over the fate of historical monuments, specifically public sculptures memorializing the Confederacy. Should we trash them or keep them? Annotate them or let them be? With the recent reappearance in Atlanta of a depiction of a fateful 1864 Union-Confederate encounter, there’s yet another loaded image to consider.

This monument, called “The Battle of Atlanta,” is different from many of the others. For one thing, it’s not a sculpture; it’s a colossal oil painting: 49 feet high, as long as a football field, and conceived as a cyclorama, a wraparound environment for 360-degree viewing. And unlike many commemorative statues, its political affiliation — Union, Confederate — has shifted over time, depending on where the painting was shown and who was looking.