In April of 2001, 750, 000 Mississippians went to the polls to decide whether to charge their state flag. The old flag, adopted in 1894, prominently incorporates the Confederate battle flag, and a committee set up by the governor had proposed to replace it with a pattern of twenty stars on a blue field. The »
Bragg Bowlin and I are talking as we sit in the living room of his home, a 1920s-era row house two blocks from the famous Monument Avenue historic district in Richmond, Virginia. The room is furnished in dark mahogany and cherry, with impressive overstuffed chairs and sofa. Antique lamps and rugs join with the heavy »
Reading Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, with its account of the vicissitudes of the battlefield reenactments and reenactors of the long-ago war, causes me to confront the fact of my own Confederate past. Although I never affected authentic battle garb, dine on rancid bacon and parched corn, or »
Truisms are sometimes true. And if anything has seemed self-evident to interpreters of the South, it’s the religious homogeneity of the Bible Belt. With the exception of the Mormon cultural area in Utah and adjoining states, no U.S. region seems less diverse. Fervent revivalism, civil war, and minimal immigration allowed a southern evangelical Protestant establishment—mostly »
University Press of Virginia, 1999 Like a new shoe of the correct size that initially seems to fit awkwardly because of its unusual design, Stephen Cushman’s Bloody Promenade requires patience on the part of the reader before its virtues become apparent. What at first seems to be a series of rambling, disjointed musings soon builds »
Louisiana State University Press, 2002. In this provocative book on an old subject, written for a broad audience, David Goldfield maintains that southerners have, since 1865, lived under a “burden” of history and memory. The southerner, writes Goldfield, is “either fixated upon the past and therefore immobilized by it, or. . . a total amnesiac »
“To be sure, Lee was an enormous flirt his entire life, and he may have acted on his erotic impulses outside the bonds of matrimony.” On a recent essay on Anton Chekhov published in The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm asserted that “the letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on »
Oxford University Press, 2001 Did the spouses of Civil War leaders ultimately affect the outcome of this pivotal event in American history? Would the war have gone differently if Stonewall Jackson or William Sherman had listened more to their wives? These are some of the questions considered in Intimate Strategies of the Civil War, although »
“This is a world in complete turmoil — a civilization falling to pieces — and one seldom so strongly presented in Civil War films. And yet, in the end, there is a regeneration of southern family and community.” In 1961 the Library of Congress published a filmography of nearly nine hundred motion pictures produced since »
“It has been more than seven years since the publication of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and it has become nothing short of a phenomenon.” It has been more than seven years since the publication of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and it has become nothing short of a phenomenon. The paperback edition continues to sell, the »
“South Carolina cannot boast a Civil War reenactment on the scale of those held at Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, or other famous battle sites, yet since the mid-1990s it has played host to one of growing size and reputation.” In the late 1990s, when journalist Tony Horwitz traveled the South in his quest to understand the »
University of North Carolina Press, 2004 Soon after the Civil War—and long before the current interest in “historical memory”—Americans understood that the way they remembered the Civil War would define their nation. For nearly a century and a half, commemoration of the Civil War has served as a sort of national Rorschach test, exposing divisions »