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Author Cook, Robert J., 1958- author.

Title Civil War memories : contesting the past in the United States since 1865 / Robert J. Cook.

Publication Info. Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
©2017

Copies

Location Call No. OPAC Message Status
 Axe 2nd Floor Stacks  973.71 C773c 2017    ---  Available
1 copy being processed for Axe Acquisitions Order.
Description x, 273 pages ; 24 cm
text txt rdacontent
unmediated n rdamedia
volume nc rdacarrier
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-259) and index.
Contents Introduction -- Part I. The postwar period. A fractured country and its fractured memories -- The resurgent south and its lost cause -- Remembering the victors' war in the Gilded Age -- The rocky road to sectional reconciliation -- Part II. The modern era. Distant drums in an age of global warfare -- Centennial blues -- Afterlife -- Conclusion : the continuing Civil War.
Summary At a cost of at least 800,000 lives, the Civil War preserved the Union, aborted the breakaway Confederacy, and liberated a race of slaves. Civil War Memories is the first comprehensive account of how and why Americans have selectively remembered, and forgotten, this watershed conflict since its conclusion in 1865. Drawing on an array of textual and visual sources as well as a wide range of modern scholarship on Civil War memory, Robert J. Cook charts the construction of four dominant narratives by the ordinary men and women, as well as the statesmen and generals, who lived through the struggle and its tumultuous aftermath. Part One explains why the Yankee victors' memory of the "War of the Rebellion" drove political conflict into the 1890s, then waned with the passing of the soldiers who had saved the republic. It also touches on the leading role southern white women played in the development of the racially segregated South's "Lost Cause"; explores why, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had embraced a powerful reconciliatory memory of the Civil War; and details the failed efforts to connect an emancipationist reading of the conflict to the fading cause of civil rights. Part Two demonstrates the Civil War's capacity to thrill twentieth-century Americans in movies such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. It also reveals the war's vital connection to the black freedom struggle in the modern era. Finally, Cook argues that the massacre of African American parishioners in Charleston in June 2015 highlighted the continuing relevance of the Civil War by triggering intense nationwide controversy over the place of Confederate symbols in the United States. Written in vigorous prose for a wide audience and designed to inform popular debate on the relevance of the Civil War to the racial politics of modern America, Civil War Memories is required reading for informed Americans today. -- Provided by publisher.
Subject American Civil War (1861-1865) (OCoLC)fst01351658
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Influence.
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Social aspects.
Collective memory -- United States.
Collective memory. (OCoLC)fst01739814
Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) (OCoLC)fst00972484
Social aspects. (OCoLC)fst01354981
United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
Chronological Term 1861-1865
Genre/Form History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
ISBN 9781421423494 hardcover alkaline paper
1421423499 hardcover alkaline paper
9781421423500 electronic book
1421423502 (electronic)

 
    
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