Memories Men The Saved The Union Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Memories Men the Saved the Union Pure hero worship is healthy. It stimulates the young to deeds Of heroism, stirs the Old to unselfish efforts, and gives the masses models Of manhood that tend to lift humanity above the common-place meanness of ordinary life. The better instincts of the human race have, through all the ages, recog nized and elevated its heroes into something like objects of religious worship. TO such, songs of praise have been sung, eulogies made eloquent, histories written, and great monuments erected. When gods were created by men, their deities began as heroes, and it was what they did on earth that gave them existence and sovereignty in heaven. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans and Democrats who advocated conflicting visions of American citizenship could agree on one thing: the rhetorical power of Abraham Lincoln’s life. This volume examines the debates over his legacy and their impact on America’s future. In the thirty-five years following Lincoln’s assassination, acquaintances of Lincoln published their memories of him in newspapers, biographies, and edited collections in order to gain fame, promote partisan aims, champion his hardscrabble past and exalted rise, and define his legacy. Shawn Parry-Giles and David Kaufer explore how style, class, and character affected these reminiscences. They also analyze the ways people used these writings to reinforce their beliefs about citizenship and presidential leadership in the United States, with specific attention to the fissure between republicanism and democracy that still exists today. Their study employs rhetorical and corpus research methods to assess more than five hundred reminiscences. A novel look at how memories of Lincoln became an important form of political rhetoric, this book sheds light on how divergent schools of U.S. political thought came to recruit Lincoln as their standard-bearer.

“Cook makes clear the powerful ways that the reverberations of the Civil War still resonate within American political culture. A compelling story.” —Joan Waugh, author of U. S. Grant Winner of the 2018 Book Prize in American Studies of the British Association of American Studies At a cost of at least 800,000 lives, the Civil War preserved the Union, aborted the breakaway Confederacy, and liberated a race of slaves. Civil War Memories is the first comprehensive account of how and why Americans have selectively remembered, and forgotten, this watershed conflict since its conclusion in 1865. Drawing on an array of textual and visual sources as well as a wide range of modern scholarship on Civil War memory, Robert J. Cook charts the construction of four dominant narratives by the ordinary men and women, as well as the statesmen and generals, who lived through the struggle and its tumultuous aftermath. Part One explains why the Yankee victors’ memory of the “War of the Rebellion” drove political conflict into the 1890s, then waned with the passing of the soldiers who had saved the republic. Part Two demonstrates the Civil War’s capacity to thrill twentieth-century Americans in movies such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. It also reveals the war’s vital connection to the black freedom struggle in the modern era. Written in vigorous prose for a wide audience and designed to inform popular debate on the relevance of the Civil War to the racial politics of modern America, Civil War Memories is required reading for informed Americans today. “Fast-paced, well-researched, and gripping.” —John David Smith, author of A Just and Lasting Peace