Mar. 12, 2008

Dr. Monica Gisolfi

UNCW Department of History

"The Civil War and the Making of the New South:

Myth, Memory, and Commemoration"

A public lecture

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

134 Dobo Hall, UNCW

7:30 PM

Free and Open to the Public

The Civil War and the Making of the New South:

Myth, Memory, Commemoration, and the Lost Cause

Historians often note that white Southerners lost the Civil War but won the interpretation of the War.  From the 1880s onward, New Southerners created the “Myth of the Lost Cause.”  Proponents of the Lost Cause maintained that white Southerners fought in the Civil War not to maintain slavery, but to defend States Rights and liberty.  During Reconstruction and Redemption, a range of white Southerners promoted and wrote inaccurate histories of the causes and meaning of the War and reinforced these programs by erecting Confederate memorials and monuments.

What is the myth of the “Lost Cause” and what purposes did it serve? How did African Americans’ historical memory and understanding of the Civil War differ from white Southerners’? What was the nature of the conflicts over the meaning and memory of the Civil War?  Why does historical memory matter?

Professor Gisolfi's Bio Information

Monica Gisolfi is an assistant professor in the history department at University of North Carolina Wilmington.  She specializes in the history of the American South.  Her publications include “From Crop Lien to Contract Farming: The Roots of Agribusiness in the American South, 1929-1939,” anthologized in The Best American History Essays 2008.