A01=Robert E. Bonner
Abolitionism
African Americans
American Civil War
American patriotism
Author_Robert E. Bonner
Barbara Frietchie
Battle Cry of Freedom
Benjamin Butler (politician)
Black Patriot
Border states (American Civil War)
Category=NHK
Category=NHTG
Category=NHWF
Category=NHWR3
Compromise of 1877
Confederate States of America
Congress of the Confederate States
Copperhead (politics)
Dixiecrat
Ellen Key
Emancipation Proclamation
Emblem
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Five-pointed star
Flags of the Confederate States of America
Fort Sumter
Francis Scott Key
Grand Army of the Republic
Guerrilla warfare
Henry Hotze
Henry Timrod
Iconoclasm
Imperialism
James Henley Thornwell
Jews
John Bell Hood
John Brown's Body
John Greenleaf Whittier
Joshua Chamberlain
Julia Ward Howe
Louis Wigfall
Mail
Manifest destiny
Medal of Honor
Modern display of the Confederate flag
National flag
National symbol
New Departure (Democrats)
Nullification Crisis
Origins of the American Civil War
P. G. T. Beauregard
Patriotism
Poetry
Political revolution
Prisoner of war
Puritans
Racism
Rebel yell
Religion
Second Reconstruction
Slave rebellion
Slavery
Superiority (short story)
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
The Conquered Banner
The Passing of the Armies
The Red Badge of Courage
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Trent Affair
Victory or death
War
War crime
Warfare
White Southerners
William Moultrie
William Porcher Miles
Product details
- ISBN 9780691119496
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jul 2004
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
As rancorous debates over Confederate symbols continue, Robert Bonner explores how the rebel flag gained its enormous power to inspire and repel. In the process, he shows how the Confederacy sustained itself for as long as it did by cultivating the allegiances of countless ordinary citizens. Bonner also comments more broadly on flag passions--those intense emotional reactions to waving pieces of cloth that inflame patriots to kill and die. Colors and Blood depicts a pervasive flag culture that set the emotional tone of the Civil War in the Union as well as the Confederacy. Northerners and southerners alike devoted incredible energy to flags, but the Confederate project was unique in creating a set of national symbols from scratch. In describing the activities of white southerners who designed, sewed, celebrated, sang about, and bled for their new country's most visible symbols, the book charts the emergence of Confederate nationalism. Theatrical flag performances that cast secession in a melodramatic mode both amplified and contained patriotic emotions, contributing to a flag-centered popular patriotism that motivated true believers to defy and sacrifice.
This wartime flag culture nourished Confederate nationalism for four years, but flags' martial associations ultimately eclipsed their expression of political independence. After 1865, conquered banners evoked valor and heroism while obscuring the ideology of a slaveholders' rebellion, and white southerners recast the totems of Confederate nationalism as relics of the Lost Cause. At the heart of this story is the tremendous capacity of bloodshed to infuse symbols with emotional power. Confederate flag culture, black southerners' charged relationship to the Stars and Stripes, contemporary efforts to banish the Southern Cross, and arguments over burning the Star Spangled Banner have this in common: all demonstrate Americans' passionate relationship with symbols that have been imaginatively soaked in blood.
Robert E. Bonner is Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University.
