 For People With An Active Interest in the Civil War Today |
|
Use these links to navigate on CWN's web site Home/
Calendar/
News/ News
Archive/Opinion/ Book
Reviews/Living History
|
|
|
Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
|
|
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
by David W. Blight.
Illustrated, notes, 512 pp., 2001. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, $29.95 plus shipping.
Every so often a book comes along that makes people stop and take note because while reading it one comes to realize the singular importance of the work. David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory is just such a book. Here is a book that makes a significant breakthrough in the ever-growing body of work on American memory. Race and Reunion is destined to become a classic in the field because it is a courageous work that, like all seminal pieces of historical literature, takes a com-pletely objective look at and analyzes a past that far too many people have mythologized. As long as we have Civil War historians we will continue to debate the meaning of the war. However, Blight’s work should make any serious student of the conflict stop and think about the relationship of the war to the onward march of our American narrative. Those of long ago, who have claimed the North won the war but the South won the peace, will have found a champion in this author. The of-ten overused mantra of "the winners get to write the history" may have been put aside in the 50 years between the end of the Civil War and its semi-centennial, and David Blight in this lucid and highly scholarly ac-count explains why. While it is clear at the start, the tenor of Blight’s argument, and what makes this book work so effective, is the depth of scholarship and the wide range of sources that the author utilizes to shore up his argument that to really understand 20th-century American history one must take a deep look at how the Union was reconciled and the cost of that reconcilia-tion on the African-American community. Central to Blight’s thesis is the place of race in American history and how, for much of the 20th century, the "racial question" was ignored in the wake of post-Reconstruction America. Blight examines almost every possible facet of American life and cul-ture that shaped and, in turn, was shaped by the ideology of the "Lost Cause." Race and Reunion explores the soldiers’ narrative, both North and South, black and white. Blight tackles the poetry and the literature of the period, the place of commemorative societies like the ADC, SCV and GAR, and how these groups, particularly those who embraced the "Lost Cause" ideology, ce-mented a version of American history that only our generation is begin-ning to unravel. The movement of erecting public monuments to the heroes of the South is discussed in full detail and how white Americans, both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line, came to see these monuments as a natural offshoot of the American experience. Beginning with the years immediately after the war and concluding with the ceremonies around the 50th anniversary of the war and the release of D.W. Griffith’s epic film, "Birth of a Nation," Blight takes the reader on a journey of selective memory and how and why that selective memory was produced. At its best, Race and Reunion serves to explain history and not cast judgment. There is no bashing the Confederacy or casting aspersions on particular individuals. Rather the author leads the reader to understand the complex nature of American history and how race is so important in understanding the American past. Much like the words of Shakespeare, "What is past is prologue," that are on the portals of the National Archives, David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory teaches us how to disseminate the ideas of the past with an eye towards understanding that past in relation to the present and eventually the future.
James Percoco
James Percoco was the 1993 Walt Disney Co. American Teacher Awards Outstanding Social Studies Teacher of the Year and has twice been named Outstanding State Educa-tor of the Year by the Virginia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. He teaches U.S. and applied history in Springfield, Va.
|
|
| Use these links to navigate on CWN's web site Home / Calendar / News
/ Opinion / Civil
War on the Internet |
|