Download or read book Troubled Commemoration written by Robert Cook and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-06 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Troubled Commemoration, Robert J. Cook recounts the planning, organization, and ultimate failure of United States Civil War Centennial and reveals how the broad-based public history extravaganza was derailed by its appearance during the decisive phase of the civil rights movement.
Download or read book Civil War Memories written by Robert J. Cook and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the Civil War continued to influence American life so profoundly? Winner of the 2018 Book Prize in American Studies of the British Association of American Studies At a cost of at least 800,000 lives, the Civil War preserved the Union, aborted the breakaway Confederacy, and liberated a race of slaves. Civil War Memories is the first comprehensive account of how and why Americans have selectively remembered, and forgotten, this watershed conflict since its conclusion in 1865. Drawing on an array of textual and visual sources as well as a wide range of modern scholarship on Civil War memory, Robert J. Cook charts the construction of four dominant narratives by the ordinary men and women, as well as the statesmen and generals, who lived through the struggle and its tumultuous aftermath. Part One explains why the Yankee victors’ memory of the “War of the Rebellion” drove political conflict into the 1890s, then waned with the passing of the soldiers who had saved the republic. It also touches on the leading role southern white women played in the development of the racially segregated South’s “Lost Cause”; explores why, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had embraced a powerful reconciliatory memory of the Civil War; and details the failed efforts to connect an emancipationist reading of the conflict to the fading cause of civil rights. Part Two demonstrates the Civil War’s capacity to thrill twentieth-century Americans in movies such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. It also reveals the war’s vital connection to the black freedom struggle in the modern era. Finally, Cook argues that the massacre of African American parishioners in Charleston in June 2015 highlighted the continuing relevance of the Civil War by triggering intense nationwide controversy over the place of Confederate symbols in the United States. Written in vigorous prose for a wide audience and designed to inform popular debate on the relevance of the Civil War to the racial politics of modern America, Civil War Memories is required reading for informed Americans today.
Download or read book The Coming Fury written by Bruce Catton and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2001 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the history of the American Civil War, starting with the Democratic Party's Charleston Convention in 1860, and ending with first battle of the war at Bull Run.
Download or read book America Divided written by Maurice Isserman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive account of the turbulent 1960s, "America Divided" presents the most sophisticated understanding to date of all sides of the decade's many political, social, and cultural conflicts. 45 photos.
Download or read book Troubled Commemoration written by Robert J. Cook and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1957, Congress voted to set up the United States Civil War Centennial Commission. A federally funded agency within the Department of the Interior, the commission's charge was to oversee preparations to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the central event in the Republic's history. Politicians hoped that a formal program of activities to mark the centennial of the Civil War would both bolster American patriotism at the height of the cold war and increase tourism in the South. Almost overnight, however, the patriotic pageant that organizers envisioned was transformed into a struggle over the historical memory of the Civil War and the injustices of racism. In Troubled Commemoration, Robert J. Cook recounts the planning, organization, and ultimate failure of this controversial event and reveals how the broad-based public history extravaganza was derailed by its appearance during the decisive phase of the civil rights movement. Cook shows how the centennial provoked widespread alarm among many African Americans, white liberals, and cold warriors because the national commission failed to prevent southern whites from commemorating the Civil War in a racially exclusive fashion. The public outcry followed embarrassing attempts to mark secession, the attack on Fort Sumter, and the South's victory at First Manassas, and prompted backlash against the celebration, causing the emotional scars left by the war to resurface. Cook convincingly demonstrates that both segregationists and their opponents used the controversy that surrounded the commemoration to their own advantage. Southern whites initially embraced the centennial as a weapon in their fight to save racial segregation, while African Americans and liberal whites tried to transform the event into a celebration of black emancipation. Forced to quickly reorganize the commission, the Kennedy administration replaced the conservative leadership team with historians, including Allan Nevins and a young James I. Robertson, Jr., who labored to rescue the centennial by promoting a more soberly considered view of the nation's past. Though the commemoration survived, Cook illustrates that white southerners quickly lost interest in the event as it began to coincide with the years of Confederate defeat, and the original vision of celebrating America's triumph over division and strife was lost. The first comprehensive analysis of the U.S. Civil War Centennial, Troubled Commemoration masterfully depicts the episode as an essential window into the political, social, and cultural conflicts of America in the 1960s and confirms that it has much to tell us about the development of the modern South.
Download or read book The Civil War Centennial Handbook written by William H. Price and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-04-25 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the Civil War, which began in the 1830s as a cold war and moved toward the inevitable conflict somewhere between 1850 and 1860, which was one of America's greatest emotional experiences. It tells a story of the human toil and machinery that produced more than four million small arms for the Union Army and stamped from copper over one billion percussion caps for these weapons during the four years of war. It is the purpose of "The Civil War Centennial Handbook" to present this unusual story of the Civil War, a mosaic composed of fragments from the lesser-known and yet colorful facts that have survived a century but have been obscured by the voluminous battle narratives and campaign studies. The handbook is divided into five basic parts. The first is a presentation of little-known and unusual facts about participants, battles and losses, and the cost of war. The second is a graphic portrayal of both the men and machines that made the war of the 1860s. The special selection of photographs for this portion of the story was made available courtesy of the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Next are reproductions in color of Union and Confederate uniforms from the Official Records Atlas and the famous paintings by H. A. Ogden. The fourth section is a reference table of battles and losses listed in chronological order, accompanied by a map showing the major engagements of the war. And primarily for the growing number of new Civil War buffs, there is a roster of Civil War Round Tables, as well as a recommended list of outstanding books on the Civil War.
Download or read book Last of the Blue and Gray written by Richard A. Serrano and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Serrano, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, pens a story of two veterans. In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital, his memories as a Yankee drummer boy slowly dimming. Walter Williams, at 117 blind and deaf and bedridden in his daughter's home in Houston, Texas, no longer could tell of his time as a Confederate forage master. The last of the Blue and the Gray were drifting away; an era was ending. Unknown to the public, centennial officials, and the White House too, one of these men was indeed a veteran of that horrible conflict and one according to the best evidence nothing but a fraud. One was a soldier. The other had been living a great, big lie.
Download or read book The Legacy of the Civil War written by Robert Penn Warren and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-11 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets "grows in our consciousness," arousing complex emotions and leaving "a gallery of great human images for our contemplation."
Download or read book Troubled Commemoration written by Robert J. Cook and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first comprehensive analysis of the U.S. Civil War Centennial, Troubled Commemoration masterfully depicts the episode as an essential window into the political, social, and cultural conflicts of America in the 1960s and confirms that it has much to tell us about the development of the modern South."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Class of 65 written by Jim Auchmutey and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of racial strife, one young man showed courage and empathy. It took forty years for the others to join him Being a student at Americus High School was the worst experience of Greg Wittkamper's life. Greg came from a nearby Christian commune, Koinonia, whose members devoutly and publicly supported racial equality. When he refused to insult and attack his school's first black students in 1964, Greg was mistreated as badly as they were: harassed and bullied and beaten. In the summer after his senior year, as racial strife in Americus -- and the nation -- reached its peak, Greg left Georgia. Forty-one years later, a dozen former classmates wrote letters to Greg, asking his forgiveness and inviting him to return for a class reunion. Their words opened a vein of painful memory and unresolved emotion, and set him on a journey that would prove healing and saddening. The Class of '65 is more than a heartbreaking story from the segregated South. It is also about four of Greg's classmates -- David Morgan, Joseph Logan, Deanie Dudley, and Celia Harvey -- who came to reconsider the attitudes they grew up with. How did they change? Why, half a lifetime later, did reaching out to the most despised boy in school matter to them? This noble book reminds us that while ordinary people may acquiesce to oppression, we all have the capacity to alter our outlook and redeem ourselves.
Download or read book World War I written by Jennifer D. Keene and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-10-30 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read the experiences of the men and women who served in a horrific war, across the sea-the Great War. Relying extensively on letters, diaries, and reminiscences of those Americans who fought or served in World War I, Jennifer Keene reports on training and camp requirements for enlistees and recruits; the details of the transport across the ocean of sailors, soldiers, and others being carried Over There; and the experiences of African Americans, women, Native Americans and immigrants in The White Man's Army. She also describes in vivid detail, The Sailor's War, and for those on the ground in France and Belgium, the events of static trench warfare, and movement combat. Chapters describe coping with and treating disease and wounds; the devastating amount of death; and for those who came home, the veterans' difficult entrances back into civilian life. A timeline, extensive bibliography or recommended sources, and illustrations add to the usefulness of the volume
Download or read book Civil War 150 written by Civil War Trust and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-05-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 2011 marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and so the time is right for this indispensable collection of 150 key places to see and things to do to remember and to honor the sacrifices made during America’s epic struggle. Covering dozens of states and the District of Columbia, this easy-to-use guide provides a concise text description and one or more images for each entry, as well as directions to all sites.
Download or read book The Civil War written by Robert Paul Jordan and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The War That Forged a Nation written by James M. McPherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 140 years ago, Mark Twain observed that the Civil War had "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." In fact, five generations have passed, and Americans are still trying to measure the influence of the immense fratricidal conflict that nearly tore the nation apart. In The War that Forged a Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson considers why the Civil War remains so deeply embedded in our national psyche and identity. The drama and tragedy of the war, from its scope and size--an estimated death toll of 750,000, far more than the rest of the country's wars combined--to the nearly mythical individuals involved--Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson--help explain why the Civil War remains a topic of interest. But the legacy of the war extends far beyond historical interest or scholarly attention. Here, McPherson draws upon his work over the past fifty years to illuminate the war's continuing resonance across many dimensions of American life. Touching upon themes that include the war's causes and consequences; the naval war; slavery and its abolition; and Lincoln as commander in chief, McPherson ultimately proves the impossibility of understanding the issues of our own time unless we first understand their roots in the era of the Civil War. From racial inequality and conflict between the North and South to questions of state sovereignty or the role of government in social change--these issues, McPherson shows, are as salient and controversial today as they were in the 1860s. Thoughtful, provocative, and authoritative, The War that Forged a Nation looks anew at the reasons America's civil war has remained a subject of intense interest for the past century and a half, and affirms the enduring relevance of the conflict for America today.
Download or read book Diary of a Christian Soldier written by Rufus Kinsley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a meticulous reconstruction of the life of Rufus Kinsley - an ordinary New England soldier who during the Civil War became an officer in one of the nations's first and most famous black regiments - and an expertly edited transcription of Kinsley's hitherto unpublished wartime diary. Kinsley's diary sheds light on a long neglected theater of the war - the battle for the bayou country of southwestern Louisiana - and it illuminates the workaday routines of black and white soldiers stationed behind Union lines but thoroughly immersed in the unprecedented improvisations that accompanied the social revolution that was emancipation. Kinsley's perspective is that of a too often neglected type: the absolutely dedicated evangelical abolitionist soldier who believed that the war and its consequences were divine retribution for the sin of slavery. The introductory biography places Kinsley's civil war experience in the context of his life and his times.
Download or read book American Oracle written by David W. Blight and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The ghosts of the Civil War never leave us, as David Blight knows perhaps better than anyone, and in this superb book he masterfully unites two distant but inextricably bound events.”―Ken Burns Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, a century after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” He delivered this speech just three years after the Virginia Civil War Commission published a guide proclaiming that “the Centennial is no time for finding fault or placing blame or fighting the issues all over again.” David Blight takes his readers back to the centennial celebration to determine how Americans then made sense of the suffering, loss, and liberation that had wracked the United States a century earlier. Amid cold war politics and civil rights protest, four of America’s most incisive writers explored the gulf between remembrance and reality. Robert Penn Warren, the southern-reared poet-novelist who recanted his support of segregation; Bruce Catton, the journalist and U.S. Navy officer who became a popular Civil War historian; Edmund Wilson, the century’s preeminent literary critic; and James Baldwin, the searing African-American essayist and activist—each exposed America’s triumphalist memory of the war. And each, in his own way, demanded a reckoning with the tragic consequences it spawned. Blight illuminates not only mid-twentieth-century America’s sense of itself but also the dynamic, ever-changing nature of Civil War memory. On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the war, we have an invaluable perspective on how this conflict continues to shape the country’s political debates, national identity, and sense of purpose.
Download or read book No Common Ground written by Karen L. Cox and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.
