The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and American Civil War Memory

It is surprising that scholars of Civil War memory have paid relatively little attention to the function of nostalgia within the Lost Cause movement created by white southern political, military, and civilian elites to explain Confederate defeat. This innovative study addresses this oversight by examining the emotional charge and political power of white southern nostalgia for an imagined past. This study also explores how counter-voices, black and white, articulated an alternative historical narrative to undermine the lost cause and its central themes in an era of growing racism and white supremacy. Taking as its thematic starting point the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865, the book builds on the idea that memories are produced out of historical experience by showing how their recall by individuals and groups plays an important role in the construction of the past. Using diaries, letters, reminiscences, magazines, fiction, and film, The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and American Civil War Memory illustrates how the Lost Cause shaped regional identity and distinctiveness in the decades following the Civil War as well as how critics confronted and challenged its rituals and rhetoric in cultural representations. As controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments has shown, disputes over the southern past, and how it should be remembered, still resonate today.

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