Civil War Memories

“Cook makes clear the powerful ways that the reverberations of the Civil War still resonate within American political culture. A compelling story.” —Joan Waugh, author of U. S. Grant

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. 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.

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.

“Fast-paced, well-researched, and gripping.” —John David Smith, author of A Just and Lasting Peace