![]() ![]() Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War.īlight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers’ reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. ![]() The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America’s national reunion. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. ![]() No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective memory as the Civil War. Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize ![]()
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