Elizabeth D. Samet > Quotes

“Our national problem has not been ignoring the Civil War, but turning it into a kind of theme park in which nostalgia and mendacity have eclipsed the raw and unpleasant truth that one army fought, and lost, a battle for the liberty to enslave other human beings, while the other, full of imperfect men fighting for a variety of motives, secured the emancipation of those human beings and thereby preserved a political experiment underwritten by the idea of equality.”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

“The notion that obedience dehumanizes those who render it is a popular cry of the philosophers of radical individualism, such as Thoreau, who are so important to America's myth of itself.”
― Elizabeth Samet

“We surrendered rather easily to yet another romantic notion: that meaning is to be found only in misery”
― Elizabeth Samet

“The postwar canonizing of Southern heroes, together with the cultivation of the plantation myth, which conjured an antebellum golden age, effectively destroyed the narrative of emancipation, which had been written in the blood of war”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

“James Gould Cozzens used this incident in his 1948 novel Guard of Honor, but he moved it to the South.”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

“The antebellum embrace of Manifest Destiny committed many Americans to an ideal: a country without a past.”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

“late-nineteenth-century recasting of the Civil War’s achievement from African American emancipation to white reconciliation”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

“The whistle now resides at the Pratt Institute but used to blow the shift changes at Bethlehem Steel;”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

“Yes—what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness