Reddit reviews Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
We found 11 Reddit comments about Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Belknap Press
Lee's legacy actually really grew in the post-Civil War, not only for his accomplishments as a general. I recommended this book below, which discusses Lee's actual accomplishments, as well as how his legacy was framed (and changed) in the period following the Civil War and Reconstruction.
/r/askhistorians is a better place for this kind of discussion, but I'd say the statues generally represent his legacy as an individual. But (for what it's worth) he is in a soldier's garb in every statue that I'm aware of.
Again, just to reiterate (so people don't take this the wrong way), I absolutely support the removal of the Confederate statues because of what they represent. I just grow frustrated that some people are using this as an opportunity to vilify Lee as a person, when the truth is far more complicated.
> to actually kind of getting it.
Unfortunately the "it" you've gotten is the Neoconfederate whitewashing of history. I recommend you read:
The South was not genocidal, so no, they weren't literally Hitler. But they did secede over slavery. "No, they seceded over the right to own slaves" is the same thing. Be very careful accepting the Neo-Confederate whitewashing of American history. As their own words indicate, institutions and beliefs they fought for all boiled down to white supremacy and slavery. They were not advocates for states' rights, and the Confederacy itself did not give its states the right to decide slavery.
Here is a decent article on the subject. Here is another decent list of quotations from prominent Southerners on the centrality of slavery leading up to the Civil War.
Be careful falling for the "they fought for their beliefs" argument. No kidding, the Nazis and iSIS and everyone who isn't a straight mercenary is fighting for beliefs. That alone is not ennobling of the cause. We still have to look at the cause for which they fought. Moral neutrality is in practice just a fig-leaf covering what someone happens to admire, or at the very least they don't find it all that offensive.
Except your questions do have an answer. By real historians. And they agree that racism, the lost cause, and the white south's attempt to erase the idea that slavery was a cause of the ACW. These monuments were to justify the philosophical basis of Jim Crow and the white southern way of life (and to give norhterners an excuse not to care)
While it's cool that you question everything, the rest of reddit just jumped onto the first not racist sound theory. Even though the actual history - super racist.
I respectfully disagree that this isn't a historical question, although whether this question falls in line with this sub-reddit's 20 years rule is another matter. I also think this type of question is a lot more relevant today than some question about, using a popular question from yesterday as an example, the origin of abbreviations for president's names. After all, history is completely useless unless it clarifies the present. The historical memory of events and people are a huge field within the academic historical community, and there's a lot of truly excellent stuff out there. For example, these books on the American memory of Pearl Harbor, or the Civil War, or the Oklahoma City Bombing are highly influential books. If these types of questions can be discussed--quite well--by academic historians, why not us? I, for one, am really interested in this question. Anyway, I imagine this question will be put up for deletion, but this is my attempt at arguing why we should keep it.
Edit: The deletion below is mine. I accidentally double-posted.
I love this idea.
I'll add some of my own, and I hope others do too:
Race and Reunion by David Blight is an amazing book that very clearly traces the rise of the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War and the incredible effort that Confederate veterans and, to a great extent, northern politicians put in to re-framing the meaning of the Civil War in the post-war period. It's a really amazing story, one that is woefully misunderstood today.
you should read this book, to get a historical primer on Lost Cause ideology. Then you'll get a better sense of the symbolic meaning of confederate memorial, and how they've been used in the south to maintain a police state of terror from the end of reconstruction until very recently.
These statues have a lot more symbolic meaning, not just of slavery, but of 100 years of state sanctioned terror after the civil war, than Washington and Jefferson.
https://www.amazon.com/Race-Reunion-Civil-American-Memory/dp/0674008197
If you are interested in what is academically called "civil war memory" I suggest the book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. David Blight makes a great case about how American memory of the war has taken 3 distinct tones. That in order to find a cultural acceptance as a society in the first generations after the war we have downplayed the slavery issue in favor of the emergence of the Union as a narrative for the war.
The book is fascinating, I actually took a course in college on civil war memory in american culture. In regards to your question the confederate battle flag has no one meaning and will always be viewed differently from different perspectives.
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Reunion-Civil-American-Memory/dp/0674008197
Hmm...that's an interesting question, friend. While I wasn't able to find controversy over the creation of a monument to an individual Union or Southern Unionist figure in a part of the former Confederacy, I did find this news article on a related issue you would likely find interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/us/blue-and-gray-still-in-conflict-at-a-battle-site.html?_r=0
Essentially, there was a monument to Confederate soldiers at a battleground in Florida. Some folks wanted to erect a monument to the Union dead as well (the Union lost that battle) but were vociferously opposed; organizations such as the Daughters of the Confederacy claimed they merely did not want to change an established historical site. My skepticism of such a claim is obvious (I've precious little sympathy for the Confederacy or its defenders), but I'll say no more than that, both to keep on-topic and to maintain civility, as the rules recommend we do. So I'll just note that this does seem to be an example of a Union monument being opposed on Confederate soil, but it's the only one I could find.
Now, I would wager that a monument to, say, William T. Sherman somewhere in the South would garner a lot of opposition, because his "March to the Sea" and the destruction it wrought are still controversial even today. However, I haven't been able to find much controversy over Union memorials of any type in Southern territory. See this JSTOR article:
Frank Wilson Kiel, "Treue der Union: Myths, Misrepresentations, and Misinterpretations" in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 115, No. 3 (January, 2012), pp. 282-292, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41617001
>In fact, however, at least ten places in ex-Confederate states, four of them in Texas, have monuments to the Union.12 Greeneville in Greene County, Tennessee, has a courthouse monument to the Union, erected by Burnside Post No. 8 of the Grand Army of the Republic.13 Cleveland, Tennessee (near Chattanooga), at the entrance to the town's Fort Hill Cemetery, has a monument erected by the Grand Army of the Republic "to perpetuate the memory of the boys in blue in the war of 1861-65 who have lived in Bradley County." Denison, Texas, has a monument to the Union in Fairview Cemetery at the place of burial of six Union veterans who settled in Grayson County after the war, erected by Grand Army of the Republic of Denison.14 In New Braunfels, Texas, in a downtown park, there is a "Monument to the Memory of our Fallen Soldiers of the Civil War 1861-1865," which honors soldiers of both sides of the conflict.15 Greenwood Cemetery in Dallas has a memorial erected by the Grand Army of the Republic in association with the graves of Union soldiers.16
I haven't heard of any controversy swirling up over those places. I suppose--perhaps--reasons for a comparative lack of opposition to Union monuments on Rebel soil might be found in books such as David Blight's Race and Reunion and Nina Silber's Romance of Reunion, which each explore (to summarize very succinctly two very extensive works) how the Civil War was recast as a noble struggle in which both sides, blue and grey, displayed manly valor (making them both "good guys," so to speak) and that neither had anything to be ashamed of. As Blight makes clear, of course, this approach might have helped the two sections reconcile, but it also papered over the role of slavery in causing the war and contributed to the persistence of racism in the succeeding decades.
Amazon.com links for the two books:
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Reunion-Civil-American-Memory/dp/0674008197/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
http://www.amazon.com/Romance-Reunion-Northerners-1865-1900-America/dp/0807846856/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457759229&sr=1-1&keywords=romance+of+reunion
Hope this helps at least a little bit!
Anyone who wants to get a book that helps explain how this mentality came to be should pick up David Blight’s “Race and Reunion” In his book, he goes through the various “views” Civil War memory took and through various political actions and popularity, came to be the accepted story. He does a great job of using actual contemporary sources and not just a crazy white guys rumination from the 70’s. Amazon Link
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.