![]() Read a New York Times piece coauthored by Blight about Martin Luther King, Jr.At the Atlantic, read Blight’s reminder that, even 150 years after the surrender at Appomattox, the issues central to the Civil War are still terribly salient to American lives.Blight establishes the battle for reform between Northerners and Southerners differences in beliefs. At the Guardian, read Professor Blight’s response to summer 2017 controversy and violence regarding Confederate statues and white supremacism The book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, by David Blight, characterizes America’s memory of the Civil War conflict.Levin, on the University of North Carolina’s controversial and, they argue, severely misguided decision to pay the white nationalist group Sons of Confederate Veterans $2.5 million to relocate and house the statue “Silent Sam” Blight has reconstructed Turnages and Washingtons childhoods as sons of white. Fitzhugh Brundage and Searching for Black Confederates author Kevin M. Working from an unusual abundance of genealogical material, historian David W. At the Atlantic, read David Blight, writing with The Southern Past author W.By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today. Blight’s sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War.īlight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers’ reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America’s national reunion. Race and Reunion is a brilliant book. David Blight tells it with a passionate, soulful voice, a voice of conviction based on an intimate knowledge of a sweeping array of sources. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. This is a story of mammoth and tragic sweep, with consequences that are very much alive in present-day America. No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective memory as the Civil War. Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize ![]()
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