Civil War
HOW DO WE REMEMBER THE CIVIL WAR?
We're marking the Civil War's Sesquicentennial over the next few months with featured content, and much of this content will address the role the Civil War has played and continues to play in popular memory and culture. This special section of our website has been selected by the Library of Congress to preserve in its own archives. You can read any of this material online in full through Project Muse by following the direct links below. In some cases, you also can download individual articles or features for Kindle, Nook, or Sony Library Reader.
How do we remember the Civil War? Next year, we'll attempt to answer that question with a new special issue, for which we've just made the call for submissions. In the interim, we'll continue to explore the War--this month with special featured content from Peter Coclanis, as well as with more new online material that we've only recently made available from our archives, including our vintage issue on The Civil War and Confederate Culture.
FEATURED CONTENT
The American Civil War in Economic Perspective: Basic Questions and Some Answers
by Peter A. Coclanis
"To estimate the war's cost is a difficult and slightly unseemly business. Not only do questionable assumptions, interpolations, and extrapolations arise, but one is forced to price the priceless-setting a monetary value on human life. Not surprisingly, for generations after the Civil War, scholars skirted the issue of the war's costs. Instead, they stated with gravity that the war had cost a lot, but acted as though the only charge worthy of close study was General George Edward Pickett's . . ."
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Material Now Available Online for the First Time
What Is Social Memory?
by Scot A. French
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995: Memory
Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past, 1855-1915
by Catherine W. Bishir
Southern Cultures, Inaugural Issue, 1993
The Confederate Battle Flag in American History and Culture
by John M. Coski
Through more than three dozen photographs, the author reveals the battle flag's history and its symbolism.
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Issue 2, Winter 1996
The Confederate Flag and the Meaning of Southern History
by Kevin Thornton
The author argues that the time has come to give up the Confederate battle flag as a public symbol. A sense of southern identity, though, should be preserved.
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Issue 2, Winter 1996
The Black and the Gray
An Interview with Tony Horwitz
Were there really black Confederates? A Wall Street Journal reporter weighs the evidence.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Issue 1, Spring 1998: Politics
When Mail Was Armor: Envelopes of the Great Rebellion, 1861-1865
by Stephen W. Berry
Images on Civil War envelopes reveal a previously overlooked battleground.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Issue 3, Fall 1998
We've Got to Get Out of This Place: Tony Horwitz Tours the Civil War South
by Grace Elizabeth Hale
Is it heritage, not hate? A review of Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic probes the many meanings of Civil War nostalgia.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
Every Man Has Got the Right To Get Killed? The Civil War Narratives of Mary Johnston and Caroline Gordon
by Sarah E. Gardner
The vivid--and graphic--novels of two women authors usher in new views of the War and redefine a genre.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Issue 4, Winter 1999
Equine Relics of the Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust
"Wounded fourteen times in all, Old Baldy was lucky to have a carcass left to be stuffed."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Issue 1, Spring 2000: Fifth Anniversary
Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War
by Drew Gilpin Faust
reviewed by William L. Barney
Southern Cultures, Inaugural Issue, 1993
Embattled Emblem: The Army of Northern Virginia Battle Flag, 1861 to the Present
An Exhibition at the Museum of the Confederacy
reviewed by Edward L. Ayers
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Issue 1, Fall 1994
Living Moments: Confederate Soldiers' Homes in the New South
by R.B. Rosenburg
reviewed by Karen L. Cox
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Issue 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996: Double Issue
Michael A. Morrison
Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War
reviewed by William L. Barney
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Issue 1, Spring 1998: Politics
LeeAnn Whites's
The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890
reviewed by Anne M. Valk
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Issue 4, Winter 1998: South in the World
Edward D. C. Cambell Jr. and Kym S. Rice, editors
A Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy
reviewed by LeeAnn Whites
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
Richard B. McCaslin's
Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of North Carolina in the Civil War
reviewed by William Harris
"This attractive and well-designed photographic history fulfills in admirable fashion Richard McCaslin's objective: ‘to present a carefully selected array of images that convey the experience of many citizens of the North State during the Civil War."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Issue 2, Summer 2000
Eugene Genovese's
A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South
reviewed by Annette Laing
"Poor God. He must find it thoroughly tiresome to be constantly called upon to endorse all sorts of peculiar causes."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 3, Fall 2000
Most Recently Published
"Truth is mighty & will eventually prevail":
Political Correctness, Neo-Confederates, and Robert E. Lee
by Peter S. Carmichael
"Defeat, Lee insisted, was his responsibility alone.'No blame can be attached to the army for its failure to accomplish what was projected by me. I am alone to blame, in perhaps expecting too much of its prowess & valour."
$0.99 download for KINDLE or for NOOK or for SONY LIBRARY READER
Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($4.15), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
Another "Lost Cause"
The Irish in the South Remember the Confederacy
by David Gleeson
"As there had been only two prominent Irish generals, and only one, Cleburne, had had a very distinguished record, the story of the common soldier was the story of the Irish Confederate."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96), for Nook ($7.96), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2011: The Irish
Joseph T. Glatthaar
General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse
reviewed by Gerald J. Prokopowicz
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96), for Nook ($7.96), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010
A Civil Passion
by James Fowler
“Civil War News, as the series came to be known, after its gazette-like report on the back of each card, offered images of brutality and mayhem sufficient to satisfy the most demanding boy’s bloodlust.”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.69) or for Sony Reader ($9.45)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010
Constructing the Cause, Bridging the Divide: Lee's Tomb at Washington's College
by Christopher R. Lawton
"When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, there were already 1,800 Union dead from First Manassas buried in his wife's rose garden."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 2009
Memorial Observances
by Catherine W. Bishir
"For years I had wanted to visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that battlefield where the direction of the nation's history changed, the center of more than a century of memorialization. Yet, no amount of reading prepared me for its effect."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 2009
Andrew Silver
Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor (review)
reviewed by Johanna Shields
"This is a book about humor that will not let you smile."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2008
Sheldon Hackney
Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
James C. Cobb
Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (review)
reviewed by Jane Elizabeth Dailey
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
Paul Harvey
Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (review)
reviewed by Matt J. Zacharias Harper
"If you think you understand how religion and race work in the South, then obviously no one has explained it to you properly."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (review)
reviewed by John Bodnar
"Fitzhugh Brundage's excellent book takes up the subject of public forms of remembering and commemoration in the South since the Civil War."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
"The Boys Will Have to Fight the Battles without Me": The Making of Sam Davis, "Boy Hero of the Confederacy"
by Edward John Harcourt
"'You could buy all the dope you wanted in the drug store. Just ask for it, and you got it.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
Twenty-First-Century Slavery Or, How to Extend the Confederacy for Two Centuries Beyond Its Planned Demise
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, directed by Kevin Wilmott
reviewed by Trudier Harris
"Are blacks to be proud of the film? Or is it just an expansive, self-indulgent joke that gones on too long?"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
Tobacco's Civil War: Images of the Sectional Conflict on Tobacco Package Labels
by Paul D. H. Quigley
"Decades before they used sex to sell cigarettes, they were using sectionalism to sell cigars."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco
Peter S. Carmichael
The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (review)
reviewed by Stephen Berry
"The young fight our wars. They have the least to lose, the most to prove, a high tolerance for risk, and a low degree of cynicism. When it comes to killing, we tap our children."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco
Anne Sarah Rubin
The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (review)
reviewed by Don H. Doyle
"The nation resided in the heart and mind."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006
Roy Blount, Jr.
Robert E. Lee: A Shattered Nation (review)
reviewed by J. Tracy Power
"'What on earth,' you may be asking yourself, 'is the point of another book on Robert E. Lee?'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006
Teaching Gone with the Wind in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
by Mart A. Stewart
"'There were a lot of Scarletts in Vietnam after 1975.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005
Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, Editors
The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (review)
reviewed by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
"Soon after the Civil War Americans understood that the way they remembered the Civil War would define their nation."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005
K. Michael Prince
Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (review)
reviewed by John M. Coski
"'The flag is, in its very essence, irresolute and contradictory. Wiping it out, eliminating it from view, would be just as wrong as hoisting it atop the highest flag-pole in the center of town--if only because it serves as a useful reminder of a past that failed and of an alternate future not taken.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
"The Dread Void of Uncertainty": Naming the Dead in the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust
"More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined up to Vietnam. Death touched nearly every American, North and South, of the Civil War era, yet the unanticipated scale of the destruction meant that at least half these dead remained unidentified."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
Playing Rebels: Reenactment as Nostalgia and Defense of the Confederacy in the Battle of Aiken
by James O. Farmer
"South Carolina cannot boast a Civil War reenactment on the scale of those held at Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, or other famous battle sites, yet since the mid-1990s it has played host to one of growing size and reputation."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2005
"A World Properly Put Together": Environmental Knowledge in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain
by Albert Way
“It has been more than seven years since the publication of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and it has become nothing short of a phenomenon.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004
King Solomon's Dilemma—and the Confederacy's
by Eugene D. Genovese
“If southerners did not live up to Christian standards in their daily lives and, in particular, bring slavery up to Abramic standards, they warned, a wrathful God would use the heathen Yankees, as He had used heathens of yore, to smite his Chosen People.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004
Karen L. Cox
Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (review)
reviewed by Gaines M. Foster
“Women, not men, shaped the South’s memory of the war and thereby perpetuated a ‘Confederate culture’ that celebrated mainly the veterans but also the women of the wartime generation.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004
Confederate Money: A Memoir of the 1850s and 1860s
by Virginia Fendley Dickinson (1847–1941)
edited by Angela Potter
“Butler was already firing on Drewry's Bluff a few miles from Richmond, and the cannon balls were falling in every direction.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
David R. Goldfield
Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (review)
reviewed by David W. Blight
"Southerners have, since 1865, lived under a 'burden' of history and memory."
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
In Search of the Lost Confederate Graveyard: The Last Civil War Correspondent Enters the Field
by Charlie Curtis
“At last Curtis could sense that he was closing in on the lost Confederates.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003
Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon
Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (review)
reviewed by Nina Silber
“Would the war have gone differently if Stonewall Jackson or William Sherman had listened more to their wives?”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003
Gregg D. Kimball
American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond (review)
Wesley Phillips
Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939-1946 (review)
reviewed by David R. Goldfield
“Ironically, those with the most extensive commercial relationships outside the region--the city's merchants--evinced the strongest attachment to southern ideals, particularly the defense of slavery.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts
Struggling with Robert E. Lee
by Michael Fellman
“To be sure, Lee was an enormous flirt his entire life, and he may have acted on his erotic impulses outside the bonds of matrimony.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography
General Longstreet and Me: Refighting the Civil War
by Louis D. Rubin Jr.
“If only someone hadn’t wrapped Lee’s marching orders around a couple of cigars and then dropped them on the way to Maryland for General McClellan to find in 1862. . . . If only history hadn’t happened as it did.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2002
Living with Confederate Symbols
by Franklin Forts
“When General Robert E. Lee is commemorated, what do we do with the fact that he was a racist?”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2002
David W. Blight
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (review)
reviewed by Bruce. E. Baker
“‘Yes, though naked, we are your masters.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2002
Lay My Burden of Southern History Down
by John Shelton Reed
“Southerners are at least as likely to agree as to disagree that ‘it's important to remember our history, but the Civil War doesn't mean much to me personally.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001
John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney
The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (review)
W. Todd Grace
Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860-1870 (review)
reviewed by Jan Davidson
“Their ancestors were almost as likely to have been Unionists as Confederates, and if they were Confederates, about one in four deserted.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001
Lucinda MacKethan, editor
Recollections of a Southern Daughter: A Memoir by Cornelia Jones Pond of Liberty County (review)
Allan Paul Speer, editor, with Janet Barton Speer
Sisters of Providence: The Search for God in the Frontier South, 1843-1858 (review)
Laura Edwards
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (review)
reviewed by Julia Ridley Smith
“The girls’ desire to leave a mark upon the world and make themselves heard is plaintive and constant throughout their writing.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001
Calder Loth
The Virginia Landmarks Register, Fourth Edition (review)
reviewed by Henry Taylor
“He addressed the Vatican, suggesting that the Sistine Chapel ceiling had been more dignified before Michelangelo came in there and started mucking about with his scaffolding and his angst.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001
Stephen Cushman
Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (review)
reviewed by William L. Barney
“The great value of an eyewitness account--its unvarnished emotion and immediacy--comes at a price.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000