Race and Reunion

Although this book is less about slavery as it happened and more about what took place after the Civil War ended slavery in the United States, it is one of the best books I’ve ever seen that explains just how America still hasn’t recovered from its legacy.

This is one of those books where I kept underlining passages, such as one where the racist Southerner said that slavery was like an “apprenticeship” for “savage races” or how nostalgia for a romantic version of the Civil War poisoned our understanding of history. I want to read this book three more times… show more.

Having been raised with a love of history, particularly the Civil War, I have always sought to connect our seemingly irreconcilable differences to that great conflict. Here, I was reminded that our differences stem as much from our failed attempt at Reconstruction following the war as from the war itself.

I can’t believe we came so close to resolving our racial failings only to entrench them. I firmly believe this period in history defines who we are today.

This book clearly illustrates the mutability of memory of even the most dramatic and significant events in American (and indeed all) history.

It makes the point that memory and historical consciousness depend on the identity of the individual as well as the passage of time and shifting political realities. In this sense, memorials are not static since they do not have a fixed definition.

After reading this book I always took into account both the personal and larger difficult to define concept of public memory when writing or speaking about memorials. 

This book was, for me, like a light bulb that suddenly illuminated a dark terrain: a brilliant analysis of how American memories of the Civil War often bear so little relationship to what really happened in the actual war. Historian David Blight not only dissects myths, like the “Lost Cause”, he also explores the powerful pressures that compelled many Americans, especially white Americans, to pledge allegiance to a reconciliation between the sections. As he observes, that drive to reunify was often accompanied by amnesia about how slavery drove the sections apart and how the long history of black enslavement left… show more.