Reunion and Reconciliation, Reviewed and Reconsidered

Silber, Nina

doi:10.1093/jahist/jaw008

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…As recently as 2016, Nina Silber lamented that "scholarship addressing the progress, or not, of reconciliation among nonveterans remains surprisingly undeveloped." 65 This article helps answer Silber's call by expanding the number of voices included in our understanding of Civil War memory. There was hardly a more popular or influential figure than Roosevelt by the early twentieth century.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theodore Roosevelt and the Unionist Memory of the Civil War: Experience, History, and Politics, 1861–1918

Wetzel

2023

J. gilded age prog. era

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The meaning of the Civil War, America’s most violent experience, continued to be debated well into the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The long shadow cast by David Blight’s influential Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) has meant that debates about the impact and prevalence of reconciliationist rhetoric dominate the literature. This paper adds to a growing body of scholarship that questions the reconciliationist narrative and stresses instead the partisan understanding of the Civil War still prevalent into the twentieth century. In particular, this article uses Theodore Roosevelt’s “memory” of the Civil War to explore the linkages between the Civil War Era and the Age of Empire. It makes two arguments: 1) that in an era when a “reconciliationist” understanding of the Civil War was becoming more prominent, more often than not Roosevelt used his voice as a historian and political figure to assert a “Unionist” interpretation; and 2) that Roosevelt used this memory of the Civil War to advocate for three specific political causes: American empire, the New Nationalism, and American entry into World War I. The paper’s argument and historiographical intervention help scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to re-imagine the role of Civil War memory in the half century following Appomattox Courthouse.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theodore Roosevelt and the Unionist Memory of the Civil War: Experience, History, and Politics, 1861–1918

Wetzel

2023

J. gilded age prog. era

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“…Nevertheless, this recent scholarship complicates but by no means displaces an established line of argument by historians such as Nina Silber and David Blight that the commitment to sectional reconciliation in the decades after the Civil War "intensified the nation's embrace of white supremacy and patriarchy, while pushing the country further away from even a tentative commitment to racial equality." 45 Bartholf indeed embraced the racist roots of sectional reconciliation by choosing to highlight the work of avowed white supremacist Henry Grady as a more recent example of Americans undoing the work of Mason and Dixon. At first, Grady might seem like a curious choice as the most famous booster of the South.…”

Section: Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 The intellectual landscape of the NREA sheds new light on realtors' "imaginative side." 2 Nina Silber calls for an increased focus on such work in regard to one historical narrative that members used-the history of post-Civil War sectional reconciliation. In addition to sectional reconciliation, the NREA relied on manifest destiny and stories of the stadial progress of peoples.…”

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confidence: 99%

Realtors Interpret History: The Intellectual Origins of Early National Real Estate Organizing

Glotzer

2024

J. gilded age prog. era

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In 1891, when U.S. realtors attempted to establish their first national professional organization, the National Real Estate Association (NREA), they turned to history to provide a shared intellectual foundation to justify collective organization. Though the NREA was only in operation for a short period, the ways its members invoked history illuminate how key assumptions about race, property, and citizenship became central to a nascent national real estate industry, predating the more well-known real estate professionalization projects of the twentieth century. History united members from different regions with little in common who were skeptical of the need to form a national institution. They used history in three ways to sustain the organization: repeating narratives, theorizing historical change, and constructing historical subjects. They infused each of these with an imperial worldview fashioned from competing lines of thought in circulation at the time. Among these were sectional reconciliation, manifest destiny, and narratives of civilizational progress. Through their actions, they embedded white supremacist Gilded Age and Progressive Era formulations of history into real estate via the new institution.

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American Sympathizers: Confessing Illicit Feeling from the Civil War to the Vietnam War

Sillin

2018

J. Am. Stud.

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Portraits of sympathizers recur across American literature, from nineteenth-century narratives by Edward Everett Hale Jr., Loreta Velazquez, and Walt Whitman to Viet Thanh Nguyen's twenty-first-century novel. Together, their texts elucidate why this understudied trope remains provocative. Whereas nineteenth-century literature often imagines how sympathy fosters national cohesion, feeling for the enemy threatens such stability and prompts government efforts to regulate sentiment. Sympathizers may perform loyalty to claim the authority associated with white masculinity. Yet they also gain power by confessing to criminal sentiments. This figure thus embodies fantasies of rebellion, fears of national dissolution, and the state's affective power.

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Reunion and Reconciliation, Reviewed and Reconsidered

Abstract: Reunion and reconciliation, reviewed and reconsideredThis work was made openly accessible by BU Faculty. Please share how this access benefits you.Your story matters.

Cited by 5 publications

References 1 publication

Theodore Roosevelt and the Unionist Memory of the Civil War: Experience, History, and Politics, 1861–1918

Theodore Roosevelt and the Unionist Memory of the Civil War: Experience, History, and Politics, 1861–1918

Realtors Interpret History: The Intellectual Origins of Early National Real Estate Organizing

American Sympathizers: Confessing Illicit Feeling from the Civil War to the Vietnam War

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