American Oracle

David Blight takes his readers back to the Civil War’s centennial celebration to determine how Americans made sense of the suffering, loss, and liberation a century earlier. He shows how four of America’s most incisive writers—Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin—explored the gulf between remembrance and reality.

31. 32. 33. W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (
Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Other examples abound,
but on this topic of Civil War and Southern memory, see especially Drew Gilpin
Faust, ...