In his intriguing examination of Civil War remembrance as a public art, Thomas Brown uses civic monuments, ceremonial oratory, historical reenactment, and other forms of commemoration to explore how Americans have addressed issues of nationhood, race relations, gender, and cultural continuity in periods of social and economic upheaval. Drawing on the latest scholarship, Brown provides an informative narrative frame for 24 rich primary texts that range chronologically from the Gettysburg Address to recent debates over display of the Confederate flag. The volume includes more than 30 illustrations of public monuments and mass-circulated prints to help students learn to interpret visual evidence. A chronology of Civil War commemoration, questions for consideration, and a bibliography provide strong pedagogical support.
The year 2011 brings us the sesquicentennial celebration of the American Civil War. Surprisingly, 150 years later, students continue to find themselves asking many of the same questions about the great national tragedy faced during the centennial in 1961. For example, did slavery cause the great conflict, or did constitutional questions act as the catalyst? Does the Battle of Gettysburg represent the turning point of the War, or did that occur elsewhere? In connection with the last question, Lost Cause advocates, those great pro-Confederacy propagandists, found convenient villains to blame for the Southern defeat. One of these, Confederate General John Bell Hood, plays an important role. This paper contends that in his case, the Lost Cause is wrong and that Hoods historical treatment has been false. Standard critical treatment of John Bell Hood over the years has tended to characterize the general as rash, overaggressive, and lacking in strategic imagination. For such critical historians, Hood appears as old-fashioned and someone limited logistically to the frontal assault. These accounts mainly stress his negative aspects as a soldier and tend to center around the Battle of Franklin. This thesis, by analyzing every battle that Hood commanded as a leader of the Army of Tennessee, particularly those fought around Atlanta, reveals him to have been a far more bold, imaginative, and complex leader than has previously been portrayed.
In this expansive history of South Carolina's commemoration of the Civil War era, Thomas J. Brown uses the lens of place to examine the ways that landmarks of Confederate memory have helped white southerners negotiate their shifting political, social, and economic positions. By looking at prominent sites such as Fort Sumter, Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery, and the South Carolina statehouse, Brown reveals a dynamic pattern of contestation and change. He highlights transformations of gender norms and establishes a fresh perspective on race in Civil War remembrance by emphasizing the fluidity of racial identity within the politics of white supremacy. Despite the conservative ideology that connects these sites, Brown argues that the Confederate canon of memory has adapted to address varied challenges of modernity from the war's end to the present, when enthusiasts turn to fantasy to renew a faded myth while children of the civil rights era look for a usable Confederate past. In surveying a rich, controversial, and sometimes even comical cultural landscape, Brown illuminates the workings of collective memory sustained by engagement with the particularity of place.
The disastrous failure of one of the most widely admired heroines in the nation provides a dramatic measure of the transformations of northern values during the war.
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This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, Thomas J. Brown explains, and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. As large cities and small towns across the North and South installed an astonishing range of statues, memorial halls, and other sculptural and architectural tributes to Civil War heroes, communities debated the relationship of military service to civilian life through fund-raising campaigns, artistic designs, oratory, and ceremonial practices. Brown shows that distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I. Brown provides the most comprehensive overview of the American war memorial as a cultural form and reframes the national debate over Civil War monuments that remain potent presences on the civic landscape.
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