Before the Fall
From Burnside Drive, toward the East Angle of Spotsylvania’s Mule Shoe, before fall began to set in
Read more...“Hellmira”—a Place of “Terrible Memory,” Nearly Forgotten
Driving through Elmira, New York, last week, a comment from David Blight’s Race and Reunion sprang to mind. In the book, he quotes Clay MacCauley, a veteran from Rhode Island: “The infamous sites of Civil War prisons, [MacCauley] wrote, were forever ‘those places of terrible memory.’” The most infamous Civil War prison in the north […]
Read more...Race and Reunion 10 Years Later: Restoring Reunion (Anew)
Final part in a series The contributions of David Blight’s Race and Reunion to the scholarship on Reconstruction and historical memory are undeniably some of the most valuable (and most-cited) in contemporary historiography on the American Civil War. Perhaps more thoroughly and more engagingly than any historian before him, Blight’s Race and Reunion explains the […]
Read more...Ball’s Bluff: A Conversation with Author James Morgan About His New Book, A Little Short of Boats
First in a series James Morgan didn’t set out to write a book. “It was accidental,” he says, “like the battle. I just ended up writing a book.” We’re walking across a small clearing, some three hundred yards or so of open ground that dips into a ravine and then rises back up before dropping […]
Read more...Race and Reunion 10 Years Later: The PR Battles for Public Opinion and Memory
Part three in a series As a communications professor and former public relations guy, it’s hard for me to look at memory studies as anything but public relations cases. After all, public memory starts as public opinion, and public opinion gets shaped in the “marketplace of ideas” where competing opinions, perspectives, and stories compete for […]
Read more...Race & Reunion 10 Years Later: The Power of Interpretation and Explanation
Part two in a series Authored by James Broomall. In thinking about David Blight’s sweeping study, Race and Reunion, I am drawn to its interpretive and explanatory powers, especially as a teaching instrument. In describing how Americans’ “remembered their most divisive and tragic experience,” Blight locates three general visions of Civil War memory that […]
Read more...What’s A Picture Really Worth?
I was writing about this photo today for a piece Kris and I are working on…
Read more...The Chicamacomico Races
In the late summer of 1861, an incident occurred on Hatteras Island known as the Chicamacomico Races. It happened this way: By the end of August 1861, Union forces were in control of Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Colonel Rush Hawkins of the 9th NY Vol. Infantry was concerned about defending […]
Read more...Race and Reunion 10 Years Later: “Reconciliationist” Memory Trumps “Emancipationist” Memory
Part one in a series With a decade of perspective on which to draw, it’s clear that David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) represented both a culmination of and shift within Civil War memory studies. Blight, primarily an intellectual historian, argues that reconciliation came at the cost racial inclusion […]
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