A01=David W. Blight
Abraham Lincoln and memory
African American historical memory
African American history scholarship
American history and memory
analyzing historical texts
and reconciliation
Author_David W. Blight
battlefield preservation and history
Category=JBCC
Category=JHBA
Category=NHK
Category=NHWF
Category=NHWR3
Civil War commemoration
Civil War cultural impact
Civil War essays and analysis
Civil War memory studies
comparative historical narratives
constructing collective memory
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethical dimensions of history
Frederick Douglass writings analysis
historical consciousness in America
historical imagination and memory
historical memory and national identity
historical memory of slavery
historical narrative and social needs
historical reflection on divisive events
historiographical approaches to memory
historiography of race in America
historiography of slavery
Ken Burns Civil War series analysis
memory
memory and African American activism
memory and justice in history
memory and moral imagination
memory and reconciliation
memory and social construction
memory and societal healing
memory as cultural practice
memory studies methodology
moral stakes of historical memory
Nathan I. Huggins retrospective
North and South memory differences
postwar memory in America
public history and race
public understanding of histor
race
race and collective consciousness
race and historical interpretation
race relations and historical memory
slavery and Civil War interpretation
social significance of memory
understanding past through memory
Union soldier perspectives
W.E.B. Du Bois historical thought
Product details
- ISBN 9781558493612
- Weight: 560g
- Dimensions: 157 x 232mm
- Publication Date: 29 Jul 2002
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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During the past decade and a half, scholars have increasingly addressed the relationship of history and memory. Among American historians, David W. Blight has been a pioneer in the field of memory studies, especially on the problems of slavery, race, and the Civil War. In this collection of essays, Blight examines the meanings embedded in the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War, the nature of changing approaches to African American history, and the significance of race in the ways Americans, North and South, black and white, developed historical memories of the nation's most divisive event. The book as a whole demonstrates several ways to probe the history of memory, to understand how and why groups of Americans have constructed versions of the past in the service of contemporary social needs. Topics range from the writing and thought of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to a comparison of Abraham Lincoln and Douglass on the level of language and memory. The volume also includes a compelling study of the values of a single Union soldier, an analysis of Ken Burns's PBS series The Civil War, and a retrospective treatment of the distinguished African American historian Nathan I. Huggins. Taken together, these lucidly written pieces offer a thoroughgoing assessment of the stakes of Civil War memory and their consequences for American race relations. Beyond the Battlefield demonstrates not only why we should preserve and study our Civil War battlefields, but also why we should lift our vision above those landscapes and ponder all the unfinished questions of healing and justice, of racial harmony and disharmony, that still bedevil our society and our historical imagination.
DAVID W. BLIGHT is Class of 1959 Professor of History at Amherst College and author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.
