@sharonr, Thank you for the fantastic thread! I read it long before I joined SH and just finished going through it again so I could leave a trail of likes. Seems like this series of books is part of the sequence of post war shaping of the narrative. I grew up in east Texas, where the myth of the old south is still very strong. That perception had nothing to do with slavery; 'states rights' would be the short answer.
Gone With the Wind very much solidified the country's perceptions of the event and being released right on the eve of WWII it sort of cauterized the view of the earlier event as it opened the collective consciousness to be fed the narrative of the coming war (kind of like the release of
Pearl Harbor before 9/11). The prologue to the movie is telling:
“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...”
― Ben Hecht
It's like a glimpse of the old world and then the script writers essentially come in and post a giant sign that says OF MASTER AND OF SLAVE and it feels a little reminicent of a BEWARE OF DOG sign.
My grandfather was a prolific reader of primarily two topics the Civil War and World War II and for him the sort of official agreed upon narrative of events was as ingrained in his psyche as those of his own life. What we are doing here would have been for him as asinine as questioning the Southern Baptist Convention. Influenced by documentaries etc, I remember being like five years old playing with plastic army men and the bad guys would be the Yankees (not the baseball team) and Hitler. This was before my own perceptions became molded by the likes of GI Joe and Transformers. When my grandfather passed I inherited his copy of the Civil War OR; it takes up an entire wall in my office and is wonderfully evocative of my childhood reading in his study. Published between 1881 and 1901 in 128 volumes, if you want the official narrative of the event here it is and this is ultimately the source for just about everything written every since. One of these days when I have a spare year I would like to really dive into it from the slant of this post and SH. Has anyone here spent any time with
The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Civil War? There is so much there it is hard to know where to even start.
The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Civil War | eHISTORY
With regard to the OP, is there anywhere to find all 10 volumes of
The photographic history of the Civil War : thousands of scenes photographed 1861-65 online? I would love to go through the whole thing. Looks like the set was published by:
Review of Reviews - Wikipedia
The set feels like the 1911 version of Ken Burns. Both an attempt to solidify perceptions of the event and to sell copy. All the pictures that seem to show some of the same people could be the publishing company's post production theater troupe...
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