During the past decade and a half, scholars have increasingly
addressed the relationship of history and memory. Among American
historians, David W. Blight has been a pioneer in the field of
memory studies, especially on the problems of slavery, race, and
the Civil War. In this collection of essays, Blight examines the
meanings embedded in the causes, course, and consequences of the
Civil War, the nature of changing approaches to African American
history, and the significance of race in the ways Americans, North
and South, black and white, developed historical memories of the
nation's most divisive event.
The book as a whole demonstrates several ways to probe the
history of memory, to understand how and why groups of Americans
have constructed versions of the past in the service of
contemporary social needs. Topics range from the writing and
thought of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to a comparison of
Abraham Lincoln and Douglass on the level of language and memory.
The volume also includes a compelling study of the values of a
single Union soldier, an analysis of Ken Burns's PBS series The
Civil War, and a retrospective treatment of the distinguished
African American historian Nathan I. Huggins.
Taken together, these lucidly written pieces offer a
thoroughgoing assessment of the stakes of Civil War memory and
their consequences for American race relations. Beyond the
Battlefield demonstrates not only why we should preserve and study
our Civil War battlefields, but also why we should lift our vision
above those landscapes and ponder all the unfinished questions of
healing and justice, of racial harmony and disharmony, that still
bedevil our society and our historicalimagination.
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