“More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined up to Vietnam. Death touched nearly every American, north and south, of the Civil War era, yet the unanticipated scale of the destruction meant that at least half these dead remained unidentified.” We take for granted the obligation of our government »
University of North Carolina Press, 2007 If you think you understand how religion and race work in the South, then obviously no one has explained it to you properly. Lillian Smith tried to explain it in her 1949 Killers of the Dream: “We were taught . . . to love God, to love our white »
“Decades before they used sex to sell cigarettes, they were using sectionalism to sell cigars.” Tobacco doesn’t sell itself. Its purveyors have long been pioneers in advertising and marketing techniques. Leaf through the pages of this special issue and you’ll find plenty of evidence of that: the provocatively posed photographs of women smoking; the celebrity »
“How long could slavery have continued to yield adequate financial returns to owners, putting aside any benefits in terms of non-pecuniary factors, such as the consumption of power, prestige, or the love to domineer?” Although some obscurantist southerners, a century and a half after secession, still believe slavery tangential, if not incidental, to the coming »
“Civil War News, as the series came to be known, after its gazette-like report on the back of each card, offered images of brutality and mayhem sufficient to satisfy the most demanding boy’s bloodlust.” In New York in the early 1960s, when I was still not quite school age, I first learned what it means »
Simon & Schuster, 2008
Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War “Nineteenth-century newspaper accounts tell of snake attacks. Hornets, as my brother could tell you, can be a problem, and bears are not unheard of.” One day last year, at the end of July, I walked down to Runnymede, alongside the River Thames, and picked a mess »
Poetry
Now that the salt of their blood Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . . —Allen Tate We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overheadtrailing the boat—streamers, noisy fanfare—all the way to Ship Island. What we seefirst is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee—half reminder of the men who served there—a weathered »
“‘When my husband James was growing up, there was no race question. They assumed that was settled by the war. The Negroes were slaves and then they weren’t. That settled it.’” These oral history excerpts demonstrate the enduring influence the Civil War has had on southerners’ memories, family narratives, and even present-day self-perceptions. John Wesley »
“‘The war is surging up close about us. – O . . . if I could put into your and every true woman’s heart the inexpressible loathing I have for it! If you could only see the other side enough to see the wrong the tyranny on both!’” The decades leading up to the Civil »
“‘Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday.’” The Civil War was a little more than a year old in the first days of September 1862, and Confederate »
“From the outset, Mississippi’s commission had a clear goal, evinced by its name. The Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States was unapologetically pro-Confederate, though willing to acknowledge, however begrudgingly, the Union victory.” On Tuesday, March 28, 1961, the overcast clouds above Jackson, Mississippi, parted just around ten o’clock in the morning. Shortly after, »