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Title: Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight ISBN: 0-674-00819-7 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: March, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Challenging Memory
Comment: David W. Blight has written a monumental study about the central place of memory in American life. While Race and Reunion specifically deals with the end of the Civil War to 1913 (the fiftieth reunion of Gettysburg), it is a powerful reminder that how we think about our past defines our present and shapes our future.
Blight's book is a necessary antidote for the easy nostalgia that too many Americans feel for ugly periods of our history. Indeed, the recent comments by Senator Trent Lott show that we have not fully learned the lessons that are so evident in this book.
As Bernard Malamud wrote in The Fixer: "There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil."
Race and Reunion tells how slavery went from being seen as corrupt to being remembered as an integral part of a respectable lifestyle. It also explains how the myths of the Lost Cause were told and retold throughout the nation until most of them became part of our accepted history.
Blight uses extensive citations in his reconstruction of the campaign to legitimize the Confederate cause, the honor of rebel soldiers, and the belief that slavery was a mostly benign practice. The success of those wishing to rehabilitate the Old South was astonishing. Blight details a fact that I had never known, and one that is among the most outrageous in our history. In 1923, the United States Senate appropriated $200,000 for a memorial to beloved and faithful mammies. This monument would have been located on Massachusetts Avenue and would have been the only national monument depicting African American "heroes." Thankfully, the bill died in the House.
Throughout this book there are other detailed analyses of how emancipation and reconstruction were all but deleted from our nation's collective understanding of the causes and outcomes of the war. The value of Race and Reunion cannot be overstated. Professor Blight's work offers its readers the chance to begin to understand our tragic past and troubled present.
Rating: 4
Summary: revisionist history
Comment: What one reviewer here refers to as "advocacy" is only good revisionist history, offering correction to more than 100 years of Lost Cause nonsense and reconciliation propaganda that began in earnest within two weeks of the South's loss at Gettysburg. I would only point to other contemporary historians whose work supplements and supports Blight's excellent book and thesis: Carol Reardon, Gary Gallagher,David Glassburg, Eric Foner and James McPherson. This is a contentious subject and the interpretation is unsettling to many (neo-Confederates, in particular) who remain mired in the kind of Ken Burns myth-making that the Civil War was a tragedy with a happy ending, that the war was necessary so the country could be forever united. A happy conclusion, of course, unless you happen to be African American. Highly recommended reading, a tonic to ages of partisan recollection that distorted the meaning of Civil War and allowed most Americans to continue wallowing in nostalgia and ancestor worship while avoiding the issue of slavery and its truly tragic consequences.
Rating: 5
Summary: confederates saw the civil war as purely over slavery
Comment: From the Mississippi declaration of secession: "..Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. "
Texas:"...was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits - a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time."
Georgia:"..For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."
South Carolinia:"The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right."
Confederate Constitution:"No bill of attainder or ex post facto law [, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves] shall be passed."
Jefferson Davis:".. the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable.."
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Title: Mothers of Invention : Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust ISBN: 0679781048 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner ISBN: 0060964316 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 10 January, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson ISBN: 0674005392 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Confederates in the Attic : Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz ISBN: 067975833X Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 22 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Charles B. Dew ISBN: 081392104X Publisher: University of Virginia Press Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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