Blight, David W.

OUR SYNOPSIS: David W. Blight chronicles “how Americans remembered their most divisive and tragic experience during the fifty-year period after the Civil War.” (1) He identifies three key versions of Civil War memory that clash and overlap: reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist. Emphasizing the success of the first version, he argues that “The sectional reunion after so horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenth century, but it could not have been achieved without the resubjugation of many of those people whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage.” (2-3) Despite this reconciliationist triumph, he emphasizes that Black Americans persisted in remembering and embodying their own version of the war as an ongoing liberation struggle. However, romanticized white memory blocked genuine national collective healing during and after Reconstruction. He shows that Decoration Day, later renamed Memorial Day, became a key pillar of the national reunion narrative. Meanwhile, white supremacists implemented a regime of racial violence in attempts to prevent Black southerners from exercising rights of citizenship.