Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War

by David W. Blight

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.

Genres: History, Civil War, American History, American Civil War

320 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2002

About the author

David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Reviews

[Michael VanZandt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays adapted for book form. Blight is a truly dedicated historian -- one of the few who is truly able to regard the "big picture". Particularly, enjoyable in this book, is the way that he carves into Ken Burns's alleged neutral view of history. In truth, stark objectivity is an impossibility, as Blight makes clear. As he lays out the historiography of the time period to follow the Civil War, using the words of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and the Daughters of the Confederacy, he makes it clear the consequences of "forgotten" history. Blight is at the vanguard of this historical movement of memory and the role it plays in history-shaping and then history-making, in the form of policy.

[Karen]

* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)

Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War by David W. Blight #civilwar

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

An academic text that talks to the academy about speaking to the public. This collected essays/monograph illustrates the perils of memory work which historians have grappled with for over 150 years about the American Civil War and it’s meaning. Blight forces us to recognize how we talk about memory and witness memorialization historically as a subjective process. What he illuminates in the chapters that won’t speak to the passerby are the vast intellectual works of African-American thinkers and writers who have always been on the fringe of popular memory, and exactly why that is: Because the memory work around the Civil War had all but written out the emancipatory cause which would have brought our democratic (and possibly for the first time in this country even revolutionary) ideas to fruition. If you haven’t yet, Blight would urge you read social histories of Reconstruction. I know I will.