Get your eBook here!
Click HERE to read the Front Matter and Chapter 1.
About the Book
In the century and a half since the war, Americans have remembered the war in different ways. Veterans placed monuments to commemorate their deeds on the battlefield. In doing so, they often set in stone and bronze specific images in specific places that may have conflicted with the factual historical record.
Erecting monuments and memorials became a way to commemorate the past, but they also became important tools for remembering that past in particular ways. Monuments honor, but they also embody the very real tension between history and the way we remember that history—what we now today call “memory.”
Civil War Monuments and Memory: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War explores some of the ways people monumented and memorialized the war—and how those markers have impacted our understanding of it. This collection of essays brings together the best scholarship from Emerging Civil War’s blog, symposia, and podcast—all of it revised and updated—coupled with original pieces, designed to shed new light and insight on the monuments and memorials that give us some of our most iconic and powerful connections to the battlefields and the men who fought there.
Advance Praise
“This splendid and powerful collection of essays serves as a useful reminder that there is a great deal of difference between the reality of historic events and how individuals and groups remember those events and manipulate historic reality. The wide array of topics examined throughout this masterfully assembled anthology—monuments, commemoration, battlefield preservation and interpretation, mythmaking, and tensions among veterans—offers much for those seeking a deeper understanding of the Civil War’s contentious memory and the awesome power of the past.”
-- Jonathan A. Noyalas, director, Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute and author of Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era
“Balancing rich immersion in primary sources with creative approaches to understanding and interpreting an eclectic mix of American Civil War monuments and memorials, this lively volume offers readers the opportunity to delve deeply into the stories behind the stone and granite, and the struggles over memory that have defined every generation’s efforts to make meaning of this nation’s most defining conflict.”
-- Jill Ogline Titus, author of Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town
“For soldiers of the Civil War, battles such as Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg were exhilarating and often traumatic events. But once the war ended, how did they remember these battles and, more importantly, how did they want future generations to remember them? This compilation of twenty-eight essays by some of America’s most promising young historians is thought-provoking and informative, a welcome voice of reason at a time in our history when people too often endeavor to erase the past rather than to understand it.”
-- Donald C. Pfanz, author of History Through Eyes of Stone: A Survey of Civil War Monuments Near Fredericksburg, Virginia
“Jonathan Tracey and Chris Mackowski have done a wonderful job of bringing together many of the contributors from the Emerging Civil War blog to address the ongoing debate about Civil War monuments. These essays are accessible to a wide audience, but more importantly, they offer an important reminder that the stories of individual monuments are the product of both history and memory. Readers will be entertained and challenged by this talented group of writers. A must read.”
-- Kevin M. Levin, author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth and founder of the blog Civil War Memory
