David Blight’s New Approach to Civil War Memory

David W. Blight’s American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, just published by Harvard University Press, is a very different sort of contribution to the Sesquicentennial fare so far.

It’s not a sweeping history of politics, culture, history, or race in the Civil War and its aftermath (as was Blight’s own Bancroft Prize-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, also from HUP). Rather, it is a study of four American authors—Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin—in the era of the Centennial of the Civil War, as celebration met the civil-rights movement.

Via e-mail, the Yale University professor answered questions on his venture across disciplinary boundaries.

Q: In many ways, the book seems a conversation between eras: the 1960s when the centennial of the Civil War was still fraught with conflict and today’s more celebratory, or cerebral, 150th anniversary. What does this perspective highlight?

A. I wrote this book, in great part, as a way of doing some good, serious history of the Civil War Centennial/Civil Rights eras and beginning to reflect on where we are now as a national culture in remembering and explaining the Civil War and Reconstruction. Looking back is almost always the best way of looking at ourselves.

The book is in many ways a conversation between the era of the Centennial and that of our own time. A great deal has changed in scholarship, schools, and public memory, and some things have not. So much of the planning, events, and publication of the official Civil War Centennial, at state and national levels, never managed to liberate itself—most whites never wanted to—from the hold that the Lost Cause tradition had on American culture.  The ideas that the South had never really fought for slavery, but only for home, hearth and sovereignty, that the Confederacy was a bulwark trying to hold back the ravages of the industrial age, the last stand of an orderly racial system of contented natural laborers (black slaves) and benevolent landowners and managers (white slaveholders), still had a firm grip on the national imagination. That may be difficult for many to grasp today, but the evidence is overwhelming and I try to show that in the book....