![]() By the time I finished the introduction, I had also purchased the Kindle edition so I could alternate reading methods, and especially so I could highlight. But the book was released as an audiobook earlier this year and when I found it as an audiobook that was enough to make me pick it up. It is an expensive book, small release academic books usually are. I have been aware of Race and Reunion for several years. The center has a podcast interviewing fellows of the center and Blight is involved in that podcast. Since starting Race and Reunion, I also found out that Blight directs the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Last year I read his new big biography of Frederick Douglass, likely my favorite book I read last year. Nearly 30 hours later, I was much more familiar with both Blight and the history around reconstruction and the Civil War. I first found out about David Blight when I was introduced to the podcast of his Yale History of the Civil War and Reconstruction class. By the early 20th century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.īlight's sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. Blight 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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