A Late Encounter with the Civil War
A Late Encounter with the Civil War
MICHAEL KREYLING
Series: Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures
Copyright Date: 2013
Published by: University of Georgia Press
Pages: 128
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46nb2w
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Book Info
A Late Encounter with the Civil War
Book Description:

InA Late Encounter with the Civil War, Michael Kreyling confronts the changing nature of our relationship to the anniversary of the war that nearly split the United States. When significant anniversaries arrive in the histories of groups such as families, businesses, or nations, their members set aside time to formally remember their shared past. This phenomenon-this social or collective memory-reveals as much about a group's sense of place in the present as it does about the events of the past. So it is with the Civil War.As a nation, we have formally remembered two Civil War anniversaries, the 50th and 100th. We are now in the complicated process of remembering the war for a third time. Kreyling reminds us that we were a different "we" for each of the earlier commemorations, and that "we" are certainly different now, and not only because the president in office for the 150th anniversary represents a member of the race for whose emancipation from slavery the war was waged.These essays explore the conscious and unconscious mechanisms by which each era has staged, written, and thought about the meaning of the Civil War. Kreyling engages the not-quite-conscious agendas at work in the rituals of remembering through fiction, film, graphic novels, and other forms of expression. Each cultural example wrestles with the current burden of remembering: What are we attempting to do with a memory that, to many, seems irrelevant or so far in the past as to be almost irretrievable?

eISBN: 978-0-8203-4641-0
Subjects: History, Sociology
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. Preface
    Preface (pp. vii-xiv)
    Michael Kreyling
  4. CHAPTER ONE Remembering the Civil War in the Era of Race Suicide
    CHAPTER ONE Remembering the Civil War in the Era of Race Suicide (pp. 1-27)

    We use personal and collective memory of the past to help us negotiate the present, to determine who we are by reminding ourselves of who we have been. And those who study both types of memory tell us that we are used by these negotiations as much as we use them. My focus here is what can be referred to as collective, civic, or ritualized memory—rather than personal, although analogies connect the two. I think of it as a kind of complicated puppet theater; we are the pullers of the strings (insofar as we set dates for ceremonies of...

  5. CHAPTER TWO The Last Living Memory
    CHAPTER TWO The Last Living Memory (pp. 28-58)

    Over fifty-three thousand veterans of the Civil War registered to attend the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1913. Twenty-five years later, in 1938 at the seventy-fifth reunion of the armies who fought at Gettsyburg, approximately 2,000 of the 8,000 to 10,000 living Civil War veterans attended the event (each one furnished with an attendant at federal expense). The ratio at Gettysburg in 1938 was three Union veterans for every Confederate. The anonymous writer for United Press solemnly noted that this would be the vets’ “last reunion.”¹ He was right. Eighteen years later, on August 2, 1956,...

  6. CHAPTER THREE The Civil War and Its Afterlife
    CHAPTER THREE The Civil War and Its Afterlife (pp. 59-94)

    In the first volume of Will Shetterly and Vince Stone’sCaptain Confederacy(2007), the eponymous superhero is a strapping blond hunk in tights, with the Confederate battle flag stretched across his rippling pectorals. He looks like a pickup truck in red, white, and blue spandex. His partner is blonde and buxom Miss Dixie, a Confederate Wonder Woman without the tiara and Lasso of Truth. Following the standard superhero trope, they hide a secret identity but not in an effort to preserve their daytime personae. Far from being mild-mannered regular citizens by day, they are puppets of a propaganda machine within...

  7. Notes
    Notes (pp. 95-106)
  8. Index
    Index (pp. 107-110)
  9. Back Matter
    Back Matter (pp. 111-112)
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