David Blight Race And Reunion Analysis

From the ashes of the Civil War, rose a unified nation still embroiled with one another over memory. David Blight argues in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory that “[s]ome of the real war, and much of an imagined one, was already getting into the books.” A fierce battle of words and history dominates the post-war landscape. “Civil War memory had become a creature of the mass market,” Blight argues, “and like all markets, it produced winners and losers.” As the South endeavored to reconnect with their pre-war way of states’ rights and negro bondage, the north, through reconstruction, attempted to pummel the old southern way of life into submission. However, as reconstruction neared its end in 1877, the South emerged ready to