E-Book of the Week: The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture

Fahs, Alice, and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture is a collection of essays which explores the Civil War’s continuing social and political impact from the beginning of the war to the present. It describes changes in the portrayal of the Civil War in American culture over time and across place, and it illustrates how the varying representations of the Civil War in celebrations, monuments, textbooks, fiction, and political speech are the result of differing views of the meaning of the war. Essays on the following topics, among others, are included:

• Ulysses S. Grant’s accounts of Civil War battles in his Memoirs and in contemporary periodicals
• The “Southern Textbook Crusade,” in which southern textbook writers in the decades after the war replaced northern accounts of the War with ones that emphasized Confederate heroism and viewpoint
• Controversies over erecting Confederate monuments and statues in both northern and southern regions, and
• The portrayal of the Civil War throughout the United States during the Civil War centennial celebration.

Previewed by Anna D'Agostino, Serials/Cataloging Librarian. Click here to read this book.