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The Civil War in American Memory
Belknap Press
March 2002
On Sale: March 1, 2002
526 pages
ISBN: 0674008197
EAN: 9780674008199
Kindle: B003852K16
Paperback / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's
collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath,
Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past.
David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and
forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations
and America's national reunion. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn
America, the North and South began a slow and painful
process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the
triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional
division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between
noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national
culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited
the war, the presence and participation of African Americans
throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that
emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how
the unity of white America was purchased through the
increasing segregation of black and white memory of the
Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings
of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized
South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the
idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He
resurrects the variety of African-American voices and
memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the
emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on
its denial. Blight's sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance
and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory,
of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By
the early twentieth century, the problems of race and
reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy
that continues to haunt us today.
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