Ezra's Bookshelf

Race and Reunion

by David W. Blight · 301 pages · ~5.5 hrs

HistoryRace & Identity

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David Blight examines how Americans remembered and forgot the Civil War in the decades following Appomattox. Three competing visions struggled for dominance: the emancipationist memory, which understood the war as a fight for freedom; the white supremacist memory, which cast it as a tragic conflict between brothers; and the reconciliationist memory, which prioritized reunion over racial justice. Blight shows how reconciliation won, as veterans on both sides found common ground in shared sacrifice while African Americans' role in their own liberation was erased. The result shaped race relations for generations: the reunion of white Americans required forgetting what they had fought about. Blight, a historian at Yale, draws on veterans' reunions, literature, monuments, and public commemorations to trace how memory was constructed. He shows how choices made by the 1880s and 1890s—which stories were told, which monuments built, which histories written—created frameworks that persisted through the twentieth century. This is essential reading for understanding how the Civil War's meaning was contested and how those contests shaped American life.

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