Race and Reunion

The Civil War in American Memory

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by David W. Blight

Harvard University Press

Due/Published February 2001, 576 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674003322

Blight explores America's collective memory of the Civil War as a dangerous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. This is a story of the politics of memory, of how a nation moved from civil war, but without justice.