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The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
Belknap Press
October 2011
On Sale: September 26, 2011
328 pages
ISBN: 0674048555
EAN: 9780674048553
Hardcover
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Historical | Non-Fiction History
Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August
28, 1963, a century after the signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “One
hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” He
delivered this speech just three years after the Virginia
Civil War Commission published a guide proclaiming that “the
Centennial is no time for finding fault or placing blame or
fighting the issues all over again.” David Blight
takes his readers back to the centennial celebration to
determine how Americans then made sense of the suffering,
loss, and liberation that had wracked the United States a
century earlier. Amid cold war politics and civil rights
protest, four of America’s most incisive writers explored
the gulf between remembrance and reality. Robert Penn
Warren, the southern-reared poet-novelist who recanted his
support of segregation; Bruce Catton, the journalist and
U.S. Navy officer who became a popular Civil War historian;
Edmund Wilson, the century’s preeminent literary critic; and
James Baldwin, the searing African-American essayist and
activist—each exposed America’s triumphalist memory of the
war. And each, in his own way, demanded a reckoning with the
tragic consequences it spawned. Blight illuminates not
only mid-twentieth-century America’s sense of itself but
also the dynamic, ever-changing nature of Civil War memory.
On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the war, we have an
invaluable perspective on how this conflict continues to
shape the country’s political debates, national identity,
and sense of purpose.
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