“These wartime memorials represent the earliest efforts to [illuminate] the sentiments of soldiers who memorialized their very recently fallen comrades and the heroic events of the war on the very ground where the historic actions occurred.” The New York Times was wrong in more than one respect when it heralded the dedication of two monuments »
“‘How can I be bitter? You are my strength, you ghosts.’” In Vietnam and the Southern Imagination, Owen W. Gilman Jr. writes that “Southerners have an affinity for history, and thus Vietnam has been joined frequently to the long span of history cultivated in the South.” One of the more vocal critics of the American »
“[B]y emphasizing military conflict over political debate, by privileging valor over ideology, and by accentuating white heroism over black activism, the Foote–Burns interpretation of the Civil War gave PBS’s mainstream American audience something to feel good about.” This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of filmmaker Ken Burns’s PBS television series on the American Civil War. »
University Press of Virginia, 1996 The women who founded what is now known as the Museum of the Confederacy in 1896 had a rule that they almost always adhered to: that while they would work endlessly to preserve the memory of the Confederate Cause and the men who fought for it, they would allow no »
University of Georgia Press, 1995 LeeAnn Whites contributes to the multitude of texts devoted to the Civil War with her provocative analysis of how the war precipitated a crisis in white southerners’ gender conventions, pushing elite men and women to make order in their changing world. Gender conventions, as Whites explains, constitute “historically rooted ways »
University of North Carolina Press, 1996 Some years back I heard a conference talk in which Darlene Clark Hine pondered the focus of recent scholarship on the experience of non-whites and non-elites in American history. Although she heartily commended all efforts to bring the stories of traditionally subordinate groups to light, Hine caught many of »
University of North Carolina Press, 1997 No issue played a more direct role in the coming of the Civil War than the status of slavery in the federal territories. Territorial acquisitions more that tripled the size of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, and each addition of territory reopened debates »
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995 The Civil War has been history for more than 130 years. In the decades immediately after Appomattox, Americans developed countless narratives of the war’s events. Their versions of the conflict were communicated through soldiers’ stories and local commemorative rituals that varied according to whether they lived in the North or the »
Essay
I don’t know when exactly I learned that Tennessee was the deciding vote to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, the suffrage amendment that expanded women’s access to the ballot box. I think this history entered my consciousness in August 2006 when I saw a group of mostly white women in period attire—long »
Essay
This is the story of two silver bowls whose journeys since the decade of the American Civil War make interesting narratives in themselves because they follow closely what the late French historian Marc Bloch called “the vicissitudes of life.” The tale is one of return, and of loss averted, reassuring to white southerners, Christians and »
University of North Carolina Press, 1992. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. The struggles of black southerners during the early 1960s aroused concerned people across America to leave the relative comfort and safety of their homes and risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. Northerners Danny Lyon and Jon Daniels ventured southward in the »