The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory

How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8203-5001-1
Verlag: The University of Georgia Press

Buch, Englisch, 312 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: UnCivil Wars Series

The Civil War tends to be remembered as a vast sequence of battles, with a turning point at Gettysburg and a culmination at Appomattox. But in the guerrilla theater, the conflict was a vast sequence of home invasions, local traumas, and social degeneration that did not necessarily end in 1865. This book chronicles the history of “guerrilla memory,” the collision of the Civil War memory “industry” with the somber realities of irregular warfare in the borderlands of Missouri and Kansas.

In the first accounting of its kind, Matthew Christopher Hulbert’s book analyses the cultural politics behind how Americans have remembered, misremembered, and re-remembered guerrilla warfare in political rhetoric, historical scholarship, literature, and lm and at reunions and on the stage. By probing how memories of the guerrilla war were intentionally designed, created, silenced, updated, and even destroyed, Hulbert ultimately reveals a continent-wide story in which Confederate bushwhackers—pariahs of the eastern struggle over slavery—were transformed into the vanguards of American imperialism in the West.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Über Autor(innen)

Matthew Christopher Hulbert is a cultural and military historian of 19th century America and co-editor of The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth.