The memory of the Civil War in American culture

Alice Fahs, Joan Waugh

Univ of North Carolina Press, 2004 - History - 286 pages

The Civil War retains a powerful hold on the American imagination, with each generation since 1865 reassessing its meaning and importance in American life. This volume collects twelve essays by leading Civil War scholars who demonstrate how the meanings of the Civil War have changed over time.

The essays move among a variety of cultural and political arenas--from public monuments to parades to political campaigns; from soldiers' memoirs to textbook publishing to children's literature--in order to reveal important changes in how the memory of the Civil War has been employed in American life. Setting the politics of Civil War memory within a wide social and cultural landscape, this volume recovers not only the meanings of the war in various eras, but also the specific processes by which those meanings have been created. By recounting the battles over the memory of the war during the last 140 years, the contributors offer important insights about our identities as individuals and as a nation.

What people are saying

Review: The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture

User Review  - James - Goodreads

There are some interesting essays in this book. One of the problems with the study of historical memory is that there often seem to be a few clearly defined patterns and as the historians in this book ...

Review: The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture

User Review  - Sean Chick - Goodreads

Nothing new here, just a lot of rehashing. Civil War memory studies is still crying out for work on Union memory.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• Remembering the Civil War: 79
• The Monumental Legacy of Calhoun: 145
• The Election of 1896 and the Restructuring of Civil War Memory: 180
• The Geography of Memory: 258

About the author

Alice Fahs is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865.

Joan Waugh is associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The memory of the Civil War in American culture; Civil war America
• Editors: Alice Fahs, Joan Waugh
• Contributor: Alice Fahs
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press, 2004
• ISBN: 0807855723, 9780807855720
• Length: 286 pages
• Subjects: History / Essays; History / Historiography; History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877)