![]() ![]() Grant, who sought to keep alive the spirit of reform that the war bespoke, a wellspring of pro-Southern sentiment calculated to alter the memory of the war among most Americans reinterpreted this great reform effort. Notwithstanding some, such as Frederick Douglass, William Tecumseh Sherman, and U.S. ![]() ![]() He rightly concludes that this stolen memory of the reasons for this “strange, sad war” represents a true malignancy on the soul of America. As he does so his anger manifests itself, and I found his indignation a moving force in Race and Reunion. With considerable eloquence and not a little bitterness Blight goes on to trace the rise of a pro-Southern master narrative that ignored racism, and its manifestation in slavery, as the REASON behind the war. In the process the welfare of former slaves had been abandoned, restrictive laws had emerged to control the African American population, and the race issue in the United States-still one of the most difficult issues of the nation-was ignored in favor of white reconciliation and sectional harmony. The answer, Blight finds, is that the reasons for the war-the prohibition of slavery beyond the borders where it already existed, the morality of owning another human being, and the nature of human dignity and rights, treason, and armed rebellion-had been consciously recast as a “war between the states” in which the fundamental divisions were over fine points of constitutional law. He asked the pointed question: “What had the 50 years since the battle meant?” (p. He starts his book with a discussion of the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg in 1913, and how the theme of reconciliation and shared valor were emphasized rather than the divisive issues of slavery, human rights, and treason that the war was really about. But what does it say about a society in which the falsification of memory is overt, as David Blight suggests in this elegant depiction of the past?ĭavid Blight’s Race and Reunion is a stunning analysis of the manner in which a specific master narrative about the Civil War was constructed through its memory in American consciousness. The memories over time become more significant than the cold, hard facts of the past, insofar as they are recoverable at all, and become the essential truths of the past for the members of a cultural group who hold them, enact them, or perceive them. This memory is constructed gradually over time as people reflect on the meaning of what has transpired, and much of what emerges is not so much a fable or falsehood as it is a kind of poetry about events and situations that have great significance for the people involved. The analysis of how stories about the past become a master narrative, and what lessons they teach those interested in the subject, has been a growing area of concern in American history. One of the most powerful elements of historical study in the last thirty years is the nature of memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. ![]()
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