"Civil War Memory Studies" is a deceptively simple term. It includes how we understand what caused secession and war and how it came about (especially concerning slavery and race); how we understand what the war meant and how it turned out as it did ...
... and what happened during Reconstruction and its legacy for the American polity and population. It's also part of a larger story of expansion and definition as the American Republic wrestled with its founding principles and their unanticipated applications by new stakeholders.
This became terribly clear to me earlier this year while writing the text for an illustrated history of the war to be published in Great Britain next year.
Early on I made it clear that you couldn't tell the history of the war itself without talking about before and after.
Early on I made it clear that you couldn't tell the history of the war itself without talking about before and after.
That meant a very compressed chapter that distilled how and why I believe the war came. Hint: you can't tell that story without slavery at the center, but it's a lot more than that ... how did the debate over slavery lead to war, and why did war happen when it did?
The middle chapters wrestled with the traditional politics and military operations narrative, with space limitations and popular appeal acting as real constraints. Still, it addresses gender, race, the West, war as revoltion, home front, etc.
That's "revolution," BTW. Ugh.
Writing battle narratives for such a project still resembles sports play-by-play for me (I did some radio announcing back in the day, and I can still inflict my skills on unwilling ears).
Writing battle narratives for such a project still resembles sports play-by-play for me (I did some radio announcing back in the day, and I can still inflict my skills on unwilling ears).
The exercise reminded me that however much we honor James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, that synthesis is simply no longer adequate for our overall understanding of the period. Too much has come out since then: we need to discuss what a new synthesis would look like.
Then there was a proposed chapter on Reconstruction that became two packed chapters (still, not quite the exposition I would prefer to offer), and a concluding chapter on how Americans remembered the entire period, in scholarship, popular media (film), and ...
... the ongoing conversation between present and past, all the way down to the events of this past spring and summer.
I was writing about the present as it became the immediate past. That, folks, is an exhilarating if daunting challenge.
I was writing about the present as it became the immediate past. That, folks, is an exhilarating if daunting challenge.
I've been playing with ways about how to talk about the past in a way that engages audiences today about those large interpretive issues and why they are important.
I've also been mindful once more over the past few weeks about the challenges Ulysses S. Grant faced as general-in-chief working under Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction.
I never knew my first book on Grant (1991) would continue to be so timely some three decades later.
I never knew my first book on Grant (1991) would continue to be so timely some three decades later.
So how do the rest of you wrestle with these issues at a time when history as a conversation between present and past is as important as it ever has been?
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