Question for you: have any of you been to the Museum of the Confederacy, or to the exhibition by the Virginia Historical Society referred to in this article? How did you feel about either? And what is your take on the NYT article? Excerpts: In the South, it seems, the Civil War is often recollected through relics and ephemera. In the North the approach is different. Would a comparable Museum of the Union even have enough personal artifacts to fill it? In the Northern states, the Civil War’s traces are more in monuments than in memorabilia. There, the war is not a personal event. Despite its trauma and tragedy, it fulfilled a national function, establishing historical continuity and affirming unity, ensuring that the egalitarian ideals of the founders could one day come to fruition. For the South, though, the Civil War is just the opposite, partly because the South was where the war was mostly fought, partly because it overturned Southern institutions. The war was a cataclysm that shattered history’s continuity. (...) Reassurance is offered to white Virginians in such comparisons, reasons to suspend judgment of ancestors, or to find righteousness in rebellion. The result is a kind of exculpatory relativism, though the sentiments here lean decidedly Southward, supplemented by examples of Southern virtue and Union perfidy.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:39:36 +0000
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