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talk of the past -- firefly article
Oct. 17th, 2005 09:23 amTalk of the Past
http://www.common-place.org/vol-03/no-02/talk/
Reckoning
Jill Lepore
"As long as we have a politics of race in America," historian David Blight writes in his prize-winning study, Race and Reunion (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), "we will have a politics of Civil War memory." A pretty impoverished politics, apparently, since the need for reconciliation led white Americans, North and South, to remember the war but forget that it was about slavery. "The inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race," Blight argues, which goes a long way toward explaining the self-bloating Civil War re-enactors, Scarlett O'Hara impersonators, and dewy-eyed Dixie defenders journalist Tony Horwitz portrayed in his Confederates in the Attic (New York, 1998). And now–hold onto your hoop skirt and grab your space helmet–the Lost Cause has been taken up in outer space.
( Read more... )
http://www.common-place.org/vol-03/no-02/talk/
Reckoning
Jill Lepore
"As long as we have a politics of race in America," historian David Blight writes in his prize-winning study, Race and Reunion (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), "we will have a politics of Civil War memory." A pretty impoverished politics, apparently, since the need for reconciliation led white Americans, North and South, to remember the war but forget that it was about slavery. "The inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race," Blight argues, which goes a long way toward explaining the self-bloating Civil War re-enactors, Scarlett O'Hara impersonators, and dewy-eyed Dixie defenders journalist Tony Horwitz portrayed in his Confederates in the Attic (New York, 1998). And now–hold onto your hoop skirt and grab your space helmet–the Lost Cause has been taken up in outer space.
( Read more... )
