The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture

Alice Fahs · Joan Waugh

oct 2005 · Univ of North Carolina Press

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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.


Contributors:
David W. Blight, Yale University
Thomas J. Brown, University of South Carolina
Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine
Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia
J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida
Patrick J. Kelly, University of Texas, San Antonio
Stuart McConnell, Pitzer College
James M. McPherson, Princeton University
Joan Waugh, University of California, Los Angeles
LeeAnn Whites, University of Missouri
Jon Wiener, University of California, Irvine

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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.