Never Surrender

2019 ◽  
pp. 270-294
Author(s):  
David Silkenat
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Fort Sumter

This chapter seeks to situate how surrenders fit into the memorialization and memory of the Civil War. It argues that surrender sites, unlike battlefields, proved challenging to commemorate. This began in 1865 with Robert Anderson's return to Fort Sumter and the rise of the Lost Cause. Focusing on Fort Sumter, Vicksburg, Appomattox Courthouse, and Bennett Place, the chapter looks at the monuments built on these sites and how they were commemorated during the Civil War Centennial and Sesquicentennial.

Race and the Visions of John Lafayette Girardeau

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Otis W. Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Coping With Death

This chapter focuses on John Lafayette Girardeau, a Presbyterian leader who, after the Civil War, simultaneously worked to shape churchly reform and Lost Cause religiosity. Girardeau's postbellum ecclesiastical reform in ordaining African Americans and pushing for their ecclesiastical equality places him among emancipationists. However, his work on the battlefield as a Confederate chaplain, his aid to the public in coping with death and destruction after the Civil War, and his service as pastor of an integrated church places him in the reconciliationist camp. Meanwhile, his work as a defender of the Lost Cause, which helped justify the racial violence perpetuated by Lost Cause adherents, places him within the emerging norms of a white supremacist vision. Ultimately, Girardeau's life and world presents a much more complex picture than his missionary activity, representative Calvinism, efforts toward ecclesiastical reform, or Lost Cause ideology reveal.

Generations

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-71
Author(s):  
Lisa Woolfork
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Black Life ◽  
A Site ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
American Authors

This essay explores the ways in which African American authors of that era reclaim the slave past as a site of memory for a nation eager to forget. Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) are the chapter’s main focus. These works resist the tide of historical amnesia and “lost cause” mythology that would minimize or relegate the enslaved to mere props in the larger Civil War drama of rupture and reconciliation. By centering the stories of the enslaved as ancestral foundations of post-civil rights black life, these authors promote a model for historical memory and genealogy that elevates black resilience.

Look Away! Dixie’s Landed!

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-154
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The New Deal

The pro-Confederate Lost Cause memory of the Civil War continued to have considerable staying power during the 1930s, seen most notably in the popularity of the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind. At the same time, the Lost Cause was adapted to fit the sensibilities of this era. Many white Americans, for example, were drawn to the suffering of Civil War era white southerners in light of the economic trials of the 30s. Conservatives also doubled-down on the Lost Cause narrative as they pushed back against aspects of the New Deal agenda, as well as a reawakened civil rights movement and anti-lynching campaign. Finally, conservatives adapted the Lost Cause story to target Northern radicals and communists as the same kind of agitators who punished white southerners during Reconstruction. Black activists and communists tried to expose the racist and unpatriotic underpinnings of the Lost Cause but often fell short.

The Walter Scott Experience

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Living History ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Historical Reenactment ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Living History Museum ◽  
Historical Fictions

Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia.

The Union Cavalry in the Civil War. Volume I, From Fort Sumter to Gettysburg, 1861-1863

1981 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 929
Author(s):  
Michael C. C. Adams ◽  
Stephen Z. Starr
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Fort Sumter

ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr and the Mahdī: Between propaganda and historical memory in the Second Civil War

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehdy Shaddel
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
Ex Post Facto ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Prophetic Tradition ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractThe subject of the present paper is a prophetic tradition found in some compendia of eschatologicalaḥādīthwhich has received considerable scholarly attention since Wilferd Madelung dedicated an article to it in 1981. Whereas Madelung shares the opinion of earlier scholars that only some of the incidents “prophesied” by this tradition are historical, this study aims to show that it is a whollyex post factocomposition which, in its various strata, remarkably captures episodes from the Zubayrid war of propaganda against their rivals as well as their later attempts to redeem the memory of their lost cause as a just one. The discussion closes by producing a highly singular Syrian tradition most certainly put into circulation with the intent of countering these Zubayrid propaganda efforts.

Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History

2012 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 598-598
Author(s):  
J. G. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Lost Cause

scholarly journals Neo-Confederates take their stand: Southern Agrarians and the Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Munro
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Allen Tate ◽  
Temporal Shape ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Civil War Memory

Ninety years ago, a group of twelve Southern intellectuals published I’ll Take My Stand, a manifesto dedicated to reviving Southern values and ideals in direct opposition to Northern industrialism and philosophy. Ever since 1930, the Southern Agrarians have been frequently presented as critics of modern life, but this kind of focus overshadows another way in which they were described in those early days: as neo-Confederates. The Agrarians’ ongoing and wide-ranging engagement with the Civil War ‐ especially in the work of Allen Tate and Donald Davidson ‐ was, I argue, hugely significant for the planning and writing of the manifesto. Examining the ways in which these writers used the war also shows how they sought to retard modernist progress, embrace failure as an element of Lost Cause ideology, and distort the temporal shape of Civil War memory. Furthermore, I show here how bound up in the manifesto and related writing by its contributors is a commitment to white supremacy and violence ‐ a kind of fanatical dedication that speaks to events in the United States today.

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