Remembering with Purpose: The Nation’s Civil War

One hundred and fifty years after the end of the American Civil War, a tragedy irreversibly changed how Americans thought about and remembered the conflict. The murder of nine parishioners by a white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina changed our national conversation about the Civil War by thrusting questions that have plagued Americans for generations to the forefront of public discourse. Robert J. Cook’s Civil War Memories: Contesting The Past in the United States since 1865, which is bookended with the horror in Charleston, tackles the complexities of why we remember the Civil War the way we do. The 2015 act of racial terrorism also appears prominently throughout Kevin M. Levin’s edited volume entitled Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites, which delves into the complicated subject of how we talk about the war, and what it means to us today.

The scope of Robert Cook’s work is immense. This study of America’s developing and competing memories of the Civil War from the end of the conflict through the sesquicentennial is the most comprehensive academic work on the topic of remembering the Civil War to date. Many books longer than Cook’s have been written about topics that take up a chapter, or even a few pages, worth of space in his text. Far from being a weakness, this is the book’s exact strength. Work like this is invaluable to not only academic historians and practitioners, but also to a nation seeking to understand why the memory of this event is such a contentious subject within our public discourse. After Charleston and the 2017 events in Charlottesville, this is the book about the Civil War that Americans need.

Despite its wide scope, the details and complexity of the development of Civil War memory throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century is anything but absent. Cook does not delve deeply into the minutiae of each commemorative era, and yet his work does not read as shallow, or as a tertiary synthesis of other monographs. Although he uses the work of other historians where applicable, he has clearly done his own primary source research and drawn his own conclusions. His warning against complacency, particularly in allowing “dual heritages” that may “foster the growth of unchallenging parallel narratives likely to sustain rather than combat racial oppression,” is powerful, and especially apt given current societal debates (212).

Cook goes a step further than many authors by highlighting two aspects of this national story that are often overshadowed in other works. First, Cook details the complicity of white Northerners in the development and strengthening of the Lost Cause narrative from the end of Reconstruction throughout the twentieth century. Described as the “sentimentalized, interfamilial narrative of the war,” he correctly surmises that this was “the national government’s preferred mode of publically representing” the conflict for much of the twentieth century (6). The second point he brings to the forefront of his narrative is the continued presence of a strong counter-narrative within African American communities regarding the centrality of slavery and emancipation in telling the story of the Civil War. Historians should, and will, expand upon Cook in their study of Civil War memory, but this book provides a foundation to build on for local studies, exhibits, programs, and training.

Levin’s volume takes a different approach to many of the same subjects. Carefully chosen case studies reveal the experiences of practitioners across a spectrum of museums and historic sites in Interpreting the Civil War. Geographically and topically diverse, this book allows practitioners to learn about the challenges of sites very different than their own, all while ensuring each chapter has an...