Race and reunion : the Civil War in American memory
"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." "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."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2001
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001
History
512 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780674003323, 9780674008199, 0674003322, 0674008197
44313386
* Prologue *1. The Dead and the Living *2. Regeneration and Reconstruction *3. Decoration Days *4. Reconstruction and Reconciliation *5. Soldiers' Memory *6. Soldiers' Faith *7. The Literature of Reunion and Its Discontents *8. The Lost Cause and Causes Not Lost *9. Black Memory and Progress of the Race *10. Fifty Years of Freedom and Reunion * Epilogue * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index