Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The historical literature concerning the American South during the Civil War is of both staggering scope and peculiar character. In volume and influence, the more popular works have surpassed the academic tomes, and in several respects neither genre has much shaped the other. The result has not only been differences in the selection of topics, interpretations, and especially style between the books written for larger audiences and those directed toward scholars, but also a persistent and growing fragmentation in the literature. To be sure, historians have long focused on defining the nature of the Confederate experiment and exploring reasons for its failure, and the literature on campaigns and generals continues to grow, but changing interests and fresh ideas have produced far more diffusion than synthesis, as evidenced in several historiographical essays dealing with the more recent literature in the field (McPherson and Cooper 1998).Given the flood of popular works and the range of academic output, it is perhaps not surprising that the standard survey of the Confederacy, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (1979), by Emory M. Thomas is now twenty years old and still unrivaled. Beginning with an earlier important collection of essays (Thomas 1971), Thomas set out to reinterpret much of the Confederate experience. Far from being a bastion of cautious conservatism and states' rights, ... log in or subscribe to read full text