In this expansive history of South Carolina's commemoration of the Civil War era, Thomas Brown uses the lens of place to examine the ways that landmarks of Confederate memory have helped white southerners negotiate their shifting political, social, and economic positions. By looking at prominent sites such as Fort Sumter, Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery, and the South Carolina statehouse, Brown reveals a dynamic pattern of contestation and change. He highlights transformations of gender norms and establishes a fresh perspective on race in Civil War remembrance by emphasizing the fluidity of racial identity within the politics of white supremacy. Despite the conservative ideology that connects these sites, Brown argues that the Confederate canon of memory has adapted to address varied challenges of modernity from the war's end to the present, when enthusiasts turn to fantasy to renew a faded myth while children of the civil rights era look for a usable Confederate past. In surveying a rich, controversial, and sometimes even comical cultural landscape, Brown illuminates the workings of collective memory sustained by engagement with the particularity of place.
Thomas J. Brown is associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina, USA.
"A fine history of the people and landmarks of South Carolina that stand as edifices to both the Confederate past and what this past meant for communities enduring the throes of modernization." -- Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians "A well-timed study. . . . Extremely well written and engaging." -- Journal of Southern History "An excellent contribution to the still-fertile field of Civil War memory and offers timely insight into the South Carolina of June 17, 2015." -- Journal of American History "An excellent study of South Carolina's struggle with its Confederate past. From Reconstruction and industrialization to technological change and the growth of the military-industrial complex, Brown works to balance local memory with nationally important movements and economic change. Civil War Canon will be the standard volume on the Palmetto State's Confederate memory for a generation."--South Carolina Historical Magazine "Demonstrates the profound discontinuities of Confederate memory in South Carolina." -- Journal of American Culture "There is no place quite like South Carolina for Civil War and Confederate memory. Thomas J. Brown brings a sophisticated, critical eye and a witty pen to this enduring controversy, showing a host of ways over 150 years that the Confederacy has endured and changed as it collided with modernity on the artistic and civic landscapes of the first state to secede. This book is a brilliant new turn in our quest to know why that war and its results have never gone away." -- David W. Blight, Yale University, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
