Lost Cause Rhetorics

The writer of this entry echoed my sentiments in her first sentence, “I am a reluctant student of the Civil War.” Its funny how as a child growing up in the South I rejected where I was from, wholesale. I talked about how much I wanted to get out of the South, above the Mason-Dixon Line and never return.  The people who were vested in Civil War history, when I was young, were mainly those who saw the Confederate Battle Flag as their heritage.  These Confederate apologists were not people I could morally identify with and thus, I wanted to flee. As I grew up I was able to break from those who saw the South from behind those distorted filters.

I chose to reblog this post because I like this author’s take on David Blight‘s book and her personal connection with the same section of the South in which I grew up.

Issues and Interpretations in Public History

I’ll admit this first: I am a reluctant student of the Civil War. That being said, I would argue that any person interested in history and living along the Dixie Highway/I-75 route of Sherman’s March (where every one of my ‘stompin’ grounds as a kid was the site of a battle and whose hometown was burned in the March) cannot help but learn about the Civil War. I am also a student of American Literature, and if one likes Theoreau or Whitman or DuBois, one learns about the Civil War.

I admit the reluctance because it shaped my reading of Blight’s (good, detailed, glad I read it) book, and it shapes the way I frame my understanding of this era of American history. What was truly strange for me was re-seeing these core authors–Emerson, DuBois, Washington, Wells, Grimke, Whitman, Douglass, Johnson, etc.–completely from the lens of Civil War politics and…

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