Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

[Review Of] Out National Amnesia About Race: A Review Essay Of David Blight's Race And Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory, Jennifer Jensen

Ethnic Studies Review

In Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, David Blight is not concerned with "developing [a] professional historiography of Civil War" but rather with documenting the ways that "contending memories [of the war] clashed or intermingled in public memory."^1 Blight and others working in the interdisciplinary field of "historical memory" have broadened the scope of historical writing in their insistence that uncovering "what really happened" in the past is but one piece of the historical puzzle. Another important piece is the recovery of how historical agents conceptualized and remembered their pasts and in turn how these memories impact …