‘So long as these unhappie times did last’ (I. 6): narration in Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars and Lucan’s Pharsalia

Introduction

The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Transnational Turn in Civil War History Patrick J. Kelly (bio) Since the turn of the twenty-first century, historians have increasingly adopted a transnational approach to the Civil War. They situate America’s sectional conflict within a larger and exceptionally violent contemporary process: the worldwide consolidation of liberal nationalism in the nineteenth century. One recent thread in transnational histories of the Civil War connects the rise and fall of Europe’s 1848–49 democratic uprising and America’s sectional crisis and the development of liberal nationalism on both continents. This essay examines the links historians have made between the European revolutions of 1848 and the U.S. Civil War and points out research opportunities for scholars seeking new ways to examine this well-trodden period of American history. Far more than most U.S. historians, Thomas Bender embeds his historical narratives within an expansive global framework. In his discussion of the links between 1848—the scholarly shorthand used to describe the rise and fall of the continent’s democratic revolutions—and the Civil War, Bender argues the worldwide development of liberal government and nationalist sentiment that started in Europe played a central role in shaping the next two decades of world history. The American Civil War, he concludes, “cannot be separated from these larger movements.” Framing the Civil War within the larger global processes of the time, he suggests, offers historians far greater “explanatory power” than histories framing this conflict as an exceptional nation-bound event separated from the flow of larger international developments.1 The recent antiwar turn in Civil War scholarship, for example, does not take into account the fact that violent conflict was a tragic but strikingly commonplace component of the worldwide process of liberal nation-building during the mid-nineteenth century. The “new revisionists” such as David Goldfield, Harry Stout, and Michael Fellman argue that the Civil War could have been avoided if, somehow, the polarizing influence of [End Page 431] sectional politics, fueled by evangelical Christian fervor, had been replaced by calm and rational discussion about contentious issues such as the future of American slavery.2 Goldfield, for instance, declares that the Civil War was “America’s greatest failure.”3 For transnational historians, however, the American experience of war was anything but exceptional. The years between 1840 and 1880 were, as Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have shown, a period of extraordinary international violence. They have counted 177 “war-like confrontations” during these decades.4 Among the most violent of these global conflicts, including Europe’s 1848 and America’s Civil War, were struggles for economic development, national unification and democratic government, a nineteenth-century ideology Enrico Dal Lago has termed “progressive nationalism.”5 The transnational turn in Civil War history, then, does not regard the Civil War as a unique national “failure” that could have been avoided if only cooler heads had prevailed. The concurrent rebellions occurring in China, Europe, South America, and the United States during this era were, in this view, global in their origins and consequences and must be seen as interconnected events embedded within a bloody worldwide process that existed outside the control of historical actors in any one nation. Historians of the post-1848 transatlantic links between Europe and the United States echo an insight David M. Potter offered nearly fifty years ago. In a landmark essay published in 1968, he argued that “in both Europe and America, the forces of tradition and privilege tended to be arrayed against nationalism, while the forces of liberalism and democracy tended to support it.” Yet, as Potter noted, his insight into the connections between the political turmoil in Europe and the age of the Civil War was largely speculative. In a bibliographical discussion at the end of his article, he commented that while the number of books written on the Civil War was “enormous, the bibliography strictly applicable to this essay is composed largely of books that are yet to be written. It is in fact one point of the essay that the significance of the Civil War for world history … has been generally neglected by historians.”6 His call for a greater number of...

The Spanish civil war and its postwar period remain two of the most important historical references of present-day Spain. Along with themes of strictly political nature addressing that period of time and with the negative aspects of the transition to democracy, themes of memory and postmemory (Hirsch 1992 / Liikanen 2015) appear. Both are closely related to – although not only to – the silencing of the victims of the mentioned historical periods. By this, I am referring to the ones defeated and to the next of kin of the disappeared.
 
 Despite the famous affair of the so-called “gentleman’s agreement”, the “amnesia”, the “forgetfulness” or the “silence” of the democratic transition, a variety of narrative works have emerged in recent history; literary works that in various manners have the Civil War and Franco’s posterior dictatorship as topics or common threads in their narrations[1]. 
 The consolidation of a new literary subgenre of hybrid characteristics combining the mode of narration found in novels and the specificities of the comic strip is a novelty in the context of Spanish literature. Although already canonized in the 1970’s in the United States (Eisner, 1978), the subgenre emerged in Spain during the end of the 1990’s. With the turn of the century, a new vision of the Spanish cartoon arrived: it was no longer fundamentally limited to the sphere of children, of satire, or of short comic strips in newspapers. With an expanded format, it began addressing the adult public.
 In the selection of graphic novels that I am presenting, there are various narrative strategies and aesthetics elaborated from accounts from the Civil War, and its prolongation in the Second World War, by authors who were not protagonists in the real-life events themselves and whom I include within the wide concept of postmemory. The prevailing ideas in all the texts are as follows: the necessary recuperation of the memory of the Civil War, the presentation of the present as a result of the past and the importance of knowing the points of view of the defeated in order to update the cultural identities of the territorial sphere of the Spanish state
 
 
 [1] I have already presented one such work during the «Romanist XV» « Escribir de Oídas: Final literature of the memory of the Spanish Civil War and its postwar period” (2012).
 

The aim of the article is to address the question of the meaning and the specificity of the concept of the "civil war" in Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, a newspaper which reflected the views of the Bolsheviks and their allies. This case study examines the genealogy of the language of the civil war from October 27th, 1917 to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, a momentous event on the path to the frontal Civil War. The article reconstructs a basic repertoire of the rhetorical techniques of representation, revealing what could be said in public about the civil war and under what conditions. It demonstrates the dynamics and the contexts of rhetorical "mobilization" and "demobilization", when the militaristic rhetoric of Izvestia switched to peaceful, and vice versa, correspondingly to the usage frequency of the term "civil war". The language of class struggle, and revolutionary mythology, especially that of the French Revolution, constituted the basis of Izvestia's rhetorical strategy aimed at legitimizing the policy of the Council of People's Commissars. The concept of the "civil war" had multiple meanings in Izvestia denoting a "condition", a "circumstance", and a "threat", in different circumstances, related to past, current, and future events. It is shown that constant criticism was levelled not only at the bourgeoisie, but also at the so-called right-wing socialist parties, which were held responsible for the civil war. The civil war was semantically designated in the past, present, and future tenses. The principle of a "just civil war" was explicitly expressed on the eve of convocation and during the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, justifying the acts of violence. The article concludes that the concept of floating signifier can be applied to the civil war as a means of refocusing the research into the issue of political communication.

The Silence and the Silence Breakers of the Irish Civil War, 1922–2022 Síobhra Aiken (bio) The original timeline proposed for the Decade of Commemorations (2012–22) omitted the latter half of the Irish Civil War. The June 2022 centenary of the burning of the Public Record Office during the battle of the Four Courts was considered as a possible "capstone to the decade of centenaries."1 Following public criticism, however, the chronology of the "decade" was extended until 2023 to cover the final months of the Civil War. But this initial reluctance is highly revealing in terms of official attitudes toward the period of civil conflict. It speaks to a long-established tendency to shy away from the realities of Irish-on-Irish violence and particularly the contentious events of June 1922 to May 1923. The idea that the destruction of centuries of historical documents could offer a symbolic ending to the commemorations also reflects the long-standing characterization of the Irish Civil War as an absence within the historical narrative: memoirs mysteriously end with the truce of July 1921; statements in the Bureau of Military History (BMH) stop suddenly before the Civil War; history textbooks were characterized for decades by "oblivion after 1922."2 This type of socially validated silence is often a feature of the commemoration of war, mimicking perhaps the liturgical practices of mourning.3 But silence takes on even greater political significance in post–civil war society, as calls for amnesty in the name of the common good often translate into "amnesia" or "commanded forgetting" [End Page 260] (to use Paul Ricœur's term).4 From as early as Roman times, orator and historian Titus Labienus professed that "forgetting" was "the best defence against civil war."5 As David Armitage outlines, this connection between civil war and "historical amnesia" intensified from the late eighteenth century, as distinctions were drawn between the "blighting and collapse of the human spirit" associated with civil war and the "revelation and self-realization" offered by revolution.6 This celebrated fight for freedom versus traumatic civil-war binary is arguably the defining feature of the commemorative narrative of Ireland's revolutionary period. For example, when speaking in 1942, the Capuchin friar Fr. Aloysius Travers promised not to dwell on the "sad days of civil war and bitter strife," calling instead on his audience to "try to forget what is painful—let us remember what is heartening and inspiring."7 As Anne Dolan argues in her study of the "troubled" memory of the Free State side, the Irish Civil War produced "a will to forget, a retreat to a type of silence that erased all but the victory."8 This article is not just concerned with the silence, however. Rather, this article draws attention to the many voices that pushed against it. For just as there were objections in 2016 to the omission of the latter half of the Irish Civil War in state commemorations, so too the codes of silence surrounding the events of 1922–23—and, indeed, the many "unacknowledged" sites of civil war which characterized the revolutionary period more broadly—have been repeatedly contested over the past century.9 Fr. Travers's call to "try to forget" (my [End Page 261] emphasis) epitomizes what Guy Beiner refers to as the "paradox of intentional forgetting," a paradox that "effectively" ensures that the event supposedly condemned to oblivion "will be remembered in an obscure form."10 As historian Jay Winter observes in his consideration of twentieth-century postwar silence, "agents of silencing," who are "intent on keeping the lid on certain topics or words," nearly always have to contend with "memory agents" "equally dedicated to blowing the lid off."11 My earlier research in Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony, and the Irish Civil War (2022) investigated the silence-breaking projects of veterans of the conflict.12 This article widens the time frame of analysis by mapping the publication of popular civil-war narratives, decade by decade, from the 1920s to the present day. Despite the persistent belief, most recently expressed by R. F. Foster, that "creative literature inspired by the Civil War … remains scanty,"13 the supposed silence surrounding...

Reviewed by: Kearny’s Own: The History of the First New Jersey Brigade in the Civil War, and: Banners South: A Northern Community at War Allan Peskin Kearny’s Own: The History of the First New Jersey Brigade in the Civil War. By Bradley M. Gottfried. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pp. 301. Cloth, $36.95.) Banners South: A Northern Community at War. By Edmund J. Raus Jr. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005. Pp. 333. Cloth, $39.00.) At a time when narrative history is under attack as old fashioned and even condemned as "imperialistic," traditional storytelling continues to find a refuge in Civil War studies. And why not? Civil War historians have such good stories that it would be a shame not to tell them. Unfortunately, these stories have been told so often that they are in danger of losing their power. What is left to say about such a twice-told tale? One solution is to tell the Civil War story from the bottom up—from the perspective of the small units that constituted a tiny part of the grand mosaic. The problem with this approach is how to deal with the microcosm without lapsing into trivia. These two books confront that problem, but with mixed success. Both deal with units that served in the Army of the Potomac: the New Jersey [End Page 314] brigade for the duration of the war; the New York regiment for two years, Both endured the confusion of mobilization, the rigors of training, and the ineptness of early commanders. They even participated in many of the same military campaigns. Yet despite these overlaps, the two books are sufficiently different to prompt some useful comparisons. The 1st New Jersey Brigade was initially led by Philip Kearny, though he soon moved on to higher command. Unlike most brigades that were fluid aggregations of various regiments, often assembled for a specific purpose and then disbanded, this brigade was more permanent. According to the dust jacket of Kearny's Own (but not the author), it was the only federal infantry brigade to have "experienced the entire Civil War as a cohesive unit"—a claim that could be disputed by the Vermont Brigade of the Sixth Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Whether unique or merely unusual, the brigade's distinctive tenacity raises interesting questions as to its cause and its impact on the men who were so tightly bonded together. These questions, as well as all matters that fall outside the limitations of the book's strict chronological organization, are not addressed. This narrative strategy leaves little room for digressions or even explanations. The brigade does something one day and something else the next as disjointed paragraphs follow each other often without connection or transition. In the process, the larger picture gets lost in the mass of minutiae. It is not merely that the reader cannot see the forest for the trees, but often he or she cannot even see the trees for the leaves. To compound matters, the book is written in a clunky prose that cries out in vain for the hand of an editor familiar with the fine points of English grammar and usage. And yet, despite all these shortcomings, such is the power of the Civil War story that readers may be drawn, almost against their will, into this narrative and feel at the end as if they have lived it along with these New Jersey boys. Art is not everything. But it helps. Banners South demonstrates how even a great story can be improved through skillful telling. Rather than plunging immediately into the military activities of the 23d New York Volunteers, Edmund J. Raus sets the stage by describing the Cortland, New York, region from which this two-year infantry regiment was drawn. Raus also gives us capsule sketches of the leading characters in his story and even a collective portrait of the regiment itself—"the typical county volunteer was twenty-two years old, five feet seven inches tall and single" (12). Unlike the New Jersey study, Raus sometimes interrupts his narrative to set it within a broader context, both military and [End Page 315...

Reviewed by: Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army." by Johari Jabir Elizabeth Ozment Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army." By Johari Jabir. Black Performance and Cultural Criticism. ( Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 181. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-5394; cloth, $71.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-1330-8.) For enslaved Africans, calling to one's gods for strength and an alternative way of being was to "conjure" (p. 2). In Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army," Johari Jabir explains how performances of sacred music beckoned a healing and transformative spiritual power that enabled members of the First South Carolina Volunteers to withstand dire circumstances and to envision freedom. Jabir's theory of conjuring compellingly encapsulates the creative expression of an African epistemology derived from shared experiences of forced displacement and chattel slavery. Jabir describes singing as a form of political activism through which the regiment transcended the limits of race in America by opening temporalities where new identities could be momentarily experienced, "a way of hearing freedom before seeing it" (p. 98). Nightly performances of songs and ring shouts by the First South Carolina reveal less about the aesthetic dimensions of sound than the fusing of religion, music, and war by African American men. Jabir presents black Civil War soldiering as an improvisatory art form and a method of authorship that members of the First South Carolina Volunteers called "gospel" and what the author terms "Black Communal Conservatories" (p. 154). Jabir's theme of militarized male honor deconstructs prejudiced narratives about black Civil War soldiers and ties together fragmented army life scenes. Military service positioned these men to participate in established rites of passage that nineteenth-century Americans understood as "honor" (p. 108). Readers are invited to interpret honor as a form of freedom or at least as an established route used to claim agency and humanity through public service. Music and religion in this regiment facilitated a militarized black masculinity through which these men announced themselves, controlled their environment, talked back to captors, and stood in for other black Americans. Creative enactments of [End Page 467] soldiering that fall under Jabir's term "spiritual militancy" expose a variety of sacred and secular elements that African Americans blended together in order to understand their world (p. 55). This book makes an important contribution to the field of Civil War history in its resistance to narratives that overgeneralize African Americans as culturally and religiously uniform. Their performances showcased unique ways of knowing that forged collectivity among African people in America, yet the complexity of black American identities simultaneously resisted that unity. The non-Protestant and non-Christian musical and spiritual practices acknowledged throughout the book complicate and humanize individual members of the First South Carolina Volunteers and serve as an excellent reminder about American cultural diversity. Jabir turns to popular culture products in the second half of the book. He analyzes scripting and scoring tropes in the Hollywood blockbuster film Glory (1989), revealing an investment in conditioning viewers to understand the Civil War in terms of black victimhood and white altruism. The author relates this framing, what he terms the "sonic politics" of Hollywood history, to the First South Carolina Volunteers and the problematic archival records he engaged during his research (p. 136). This chapter typifies how Jabir confronts narrative strategies that centralize black cultural assimilation and will prove to be a fantastic companion to Gary W. Gallagher's Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2008), Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1997), and a host of other texts on Civil War memory and public history. Elizabeth Ozment University of Virginia Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

An Elaborate Pretense for the Major:Making Up the Face of the Postbellum Nation Carolyn Hall Passing as a story of romance between a doting wife and her beloved war-hero husband, Constance Fenimore Woolson's novella For the Major (1883) is also a tale of voluntary amnesia stemming from a reluctance to face particular facts about the postbellum United States. Though the novella speaks only sparingly of the American Civil War, it addresses some of the scars left in its wake, particularly those involving women's social position, racial passing, and a fear of the postwar new order. The novella's Major and Madam Carroll are the figureheads of the North Carolina mountain town of Far Edgerley, where much of Marion Carroll's time and energy is spent helping her ailing husband keep up appearances by hiding the effects of his increasing dementia. While her efforts to spare the Major's feelings suggest love and devotion, the behavior simultaneously bespeaks a desire to maintain a life that is no longer true, a desire the entire town shares and that causes the rest of its residents, too, to take pains to maintain a fictional vision of their lives. Through the various narratives within For the Major, particularly those fueled by the main characters' appearances, Woolson indicts her contemporaries for their own self-inflicted dementia as they allow the myth and romance of the past to pass for the present. By the time the novella appeared in print, nearly two decades after the end of the Civil War, conciliatory efforts between former sectional enemies were affecting historical accounts of the South and the war. Susan-Mary Grant asserts that in the 1880s the war was elevated to "what amounted to mystical status" as growing industrialism and immigration contributed to a version of patriotism that clamored for a return to the nation's original ideals while simultaneously "deliberately avoid[ing] troubling questions raised by the war concerning American nationality and the African American or even the white southern role in [the war]" (169, 170). Responding to the beginnings of such popular sentiments, many northern publications, according to Frank Luther Mott, began endorsing or at least incorporating sympathetic views of the South not long after the war's end. By the late 1860s and early 1870s, Mott claims, they were publishing attractive descriptions of the region (47–48), and by the 1880s what Gaines Foster has called "the new journalistic homage to the South" followed editors' instructions to "promote reconciliation" by "ignor[ing] or soft-pedal[ing] divisive issues" (69). According to Lyndall Gordon, one such editor, Joseph W. Harper, "ordered" Woolson, after [End Page 144] the publication of her short story "Old Gardiston" (1876), to refrain from writing in the future about "the subject of the war in connection with the South" (156). Woolson responded, however, by repressing rather than suppressing discussion of contemporary issues surrounding race, gender, and postwar legacies. The case in point, For the Major, includes multiple character and place names that resonate with the novella's nineteenth-century readers because these appellations recall significant names from the nation's recent history. Through such connections to the world outside of the novella and through the characters' behavior within the story, Woolson's economy of repression prompts a particularly close look at narrative strategies; it also posits a way of understanding the postwar period. For the Major reads as an allegory of the United States after the Civil War when it allowed reconciliation and so-called redemption to supplant and suppress legacies of war and Reconstruction through a national tendency toward repression; Woolson here imitates and thus quietly indicts this national pattern. The novella begins in 1868, three years after Major Scarborough Carroll and his wife Marion have settled with their young son Scar in the town of Far Edgerley. Though this new place sits merely six hundred feet farther up Chillawassee Mountain than the town of Edgerley, as far as the former town is concerned, the distance may as well be six hundred miles.1 The fewer-than-one thousand inhabitants of Far Edgerley—whose very name reflects not only their physical position but also their chosen figurative position...

This chapter traces the emergence and development of modernism in Irish-language fiction from 1900 to 1940, a period incorporating the rise of cultural and linguistic nationalism, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War and the establishment of the Irish Free State. In literary and linguistic terms, these decades saw a seismic transition from editing and annotating classical Irish-language texts to the privileging of vernacular forms of the spoken language and the cultivation of contemporary fiction in vernacular dialects. This chapter assesses the importance and relevance of Irish-language modernist fiction in national and wider European terms, paying attention to writers’ narrative strategies in dealing with the complexities of modernity and to the manner in which they expanded the range and scope of Irish-language fiction beyond the nativist folkloric aesthetic endorsed by cultural nationalists.

Lest We RememberCivil War Memory and Commemoration among the Five Tribes Jeff Fortney (bio) On Main Street in Norman, Oklahoma, nestled between a Bank of America and a Hobby Lobby, stands an unmistakable yet unanticipated object: a statue of a Civil War soldier. Most Americans remember the Civil War as a conflict that was fought between Northern and Southern states predominantly in the eastern theater over issues of slavery and to some limited extent states’ rights. Therefore, the question emerges: Who and what does this statue commemorate in what was formerly Indian Territory?1 As with other parts of the western theater, the Civil War in Indian Territory is frequently overlooked. Although this venue of the war is often forgotten, the Civil War enveloped Indian Territory, disrupted lives, and broke apart families just as it did in Georgia, Virginia, and other battleground states. Conservative estimates suggest that over 3,530 Native Americans fought in the Federal Indians’ Brigade, including 1,019 who were killed. Over 7,000 Indians joined the service of the Union army in an official capacity. This figure excludes a significant number of Natives who donned the rebel gray and fought for the Confederacy. Brutal home-front conditions of poverty, street fighting, and total war cut the Cherokee population in half, while diseases in refugee camps spread rapidly, decimating the Creek population. The war made more than one-third of the Cherokee women into widows and turned over 25 percent of children into orphans. The vast majority of noncombatant Natives were displaced from their homes. Some were forced to march across the Oklahoma plains in winter to seek refuge in Kansas. Native property was destroyed, while human property fled to Northern territories for freedom.2 [End Page 525] In keeping with the overall theme of this issue, this study addresses the ways in which Natives practiced self-silence in regard to public Civil War commemoration. Notwithstanding the incredible impact on Indian Territory and Indian lives, Oklahoma Indians themselves did not typically commemorate the Civil War. Therefore, Native American contribution to the Civil War was largely skewed in the American historical narrative as well as in public memorialization. A large concentration of statues, monuments, and other commemorative signifiers in the North and South excludes not only white and black soldiers who fought in the West but also the significant number of Indians who fought, resisted, and supported their own unique causes during the Civil War. For example, the aforementioned soldier’s statue in Norman, Oklahoma, is intended to commemorate a white soldier, an ancestor of those who erected it, rather than a Native American who actually fought in the area. This monument is not atypical. This seems peculiar, considering that one must traverse “World War I Memorial Highway” and pass tributes to twentieth-century Chickasaw and Choctaw war accomplishments in order to arrive at a pantribal powwow celebrating war veterans. In light of this peculiarity, this study examines why Natives who made critical sacrifices during the war sought to bury the past. It asserts that while the North won the military conflict, the South came out the victor during the subsequent Reconstruction era. As the two sides reconciled, they made concessions that allowed the South to venerate its past heritage and transplant it onto Oklahoma Natives. Native peoples, on the other hand, lost during both the war and the Reconstruction periods, regardless of which side they supported. Thus, the only true monuments in Indian Territory during Reconstruction became the scorched grounds in place of homes, weeds and sprouts instead of corn rows, and memories of federal abandonment and betrayal instead of fulfilled promises. As Indian Territory became allotted and the white population overtook the Native population, Northern and Southern Americans’ visions of the war supplanted Native Civil War and Reconstruction recollections. In actuality this meant that white settlers attempted to assimilate the Native story into their own narratives via public commemorative endeavors. Even today, as monuments of white Union soldiers and plaques from United Daughters of the Confederacy (udc) chapters dot the Oklahoma landscape, Native people generally choose not to include Civil War loyalty or Southern “lost cause” mythology as part of their collective memory. [End Page...

The civil war in Chad has become one of the most protracted conflicts on the African continent. Its gradual internationalization led to the participation of three foreign military contingents in an internal armed confrontation Libya has taken an active military part in the civil war in Chad since 1972. There were several indications in certain studies about the use of chemical weapons by the Libyan troops. In the realities of the 1980s, these allegations could be true, or they could be an element of some information campaign against Libya. The purpose of this article is to verify the reports of the use of chemical weapons in Chad. Sources, methods. The sources for the study were the UN documents, declassified CIA materials and media reports. Cross-analysis of the documents, as well as the historical reconstruction of background events were carried out. Discussion of the results and conclusions. The analysis of the sources showed that, to date, no material evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Libyan troops in Chad has been found. There were no testimonies of direct witnesses and victims. No investigations have been carried out. Two sources of dissemination of information about the use of chemical weapons in northern Chad have been identified. The first one is the representatives of one of the participants in the civil war, Hissene Habré, who held the post of president in N'Djamena and fought against the Libyan troops. Representatives of H. Habré made such statements in December 1986. They cannot be considered reliable. In this way, one of the parties to the civil war wanted to show that Chad was the victim of the aggression with the use of weapons prohibited by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. However, it was established that in 1986 Libya did not possess chemical weapons. The second source is the CIA reports retransmitted to the public space in September 1987 about the alleged deliveries of chemical weapons to Libya from Iran. The reliability of these reports is doubtful. The «Iranian trace» has also not been proven. In 1987, during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), chemical weapons were used against Iran, but the military-chemical potential of Iran itself has not been established. However, such an accusation organically fit into the policy of containment of «rogue states» pursued by the administration of US President Ronald Reagan. In this article, cross-analysis methods have been tested. They have shown their effectiveness in retrospective investigations.

Blight’s Oracles Gaines M. Foster (bio) David W. Blight. American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95. A book on Civil War memory by David W. Blight commands attention. His justly celebrated Race and Reunion has shaped historians’ understanding of how, by 1913, the public memory of the war had developed. In it, Blight shows how white Americans celebrated the heroism and honor of both sides, focused the meaning of the war on the preservation of the Union, and de-emphasized, if not ignored, its role in ending slavery. As a result, what he termed the emancipationist legacy of the war was ignored, and reunion came at the cost of rights and advancement for African Americans.1 Blight returns to these themes in his new book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Blight takes his title from Robert Penn Warren: “And so the Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of personal, as well as national, fate” (p. vii). It may not be Warren’s clearest sentence; if the war serves as an oracle, it is certainly one that speaks through others. Blight examines “the works, and to some extent the lives, of four of America’s most important writers on the subject of the significance and legacies of the Civil War during the 1950s and 1960s”—Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin (p. 7). Blight chooses these four because of their differing backgrounds and perspectives but also because they all have “an intense interest in the power of epic events, in the role of myth in shaping how people gain a sense of history, and in the consequences of human strivings, with their residues of violence, failure, and possible renewal” (p. 10). All wrote during the civil rights era, which explains the subtitle. Blight begins with a brief discussion of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” in which King evoked the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. (Blight does not mention another reference to the war famously not made during the March on Washington: John Lewis’ call to march through the South as William Tecumseh Sherman had—a reference Lewis was convinced to leave out of his address.)2 After his discussion of King’s address, Blight then rightly argues that the “Civil War and civil rights have been forever intertwined in [End Page 699] American history and mythology” (p. 2). Civil War symbolism and memory did play a role in the civil rights era, particularly among white Southerners, and historians need a study of that influence and also of how the battles of the 1960s reshaped the memory of the 1860s. That is not the story Blight chooses to tell. Blight does consider his book “a look at the Civil War Centennial era, not primarily at the level of institutions or of popular culture, but through serious literature and historical narrative” (p. 28). In his introduction, Blight recounts how civil rights issues impinged on the Centennial, drawing primarily on Robert J. Cook’s excellent study, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 (2007).3 Blight’s book complements Cook’s, which remains the best source on the Centennial. The two, though, differ in interesting ways. Of Blight’s four authors, Cook mentions only Warren and Catton. Cook does not discuss Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, but perhaps he should have. Blight observes that Wilson’s book generated review essays on the war “like nothing else published during the Centennial” and received a great deal of critical attention (p. 171). The major difference in the interpretations of the two books, though, may be in their assessment of the public memory of the war during the Centennial. Cook sees some growth in the acceptance of a black counter-memory and questions whether the Lost Cause still held great power. He even doubts that it proved influential enough for radical segregationists to rally white Southerners around an imagined Confederate past. Blight’s account implies that the Lost Cause still held sway, certainly in the South and...

The article characterizes the modern public discourse in Finland on the impact of the red and white forces on the developments unfolding in the course of the Civil War through the interpretation of historical sources. It also draws a conclusion about the transformations that historical memory has experienced in Finland over the past decades. The research tasks are solved by using the methodology of historical trauma and mechanisms of its overcoming, the historical narration of everyday life, sociological methods. The article considers the concepts of official scientific and public discourse on controversial historical issues, indicates the different functional content of these categories. The fact of granting independence to Finland in 1918, and most importantly, the fact that the independence was maintained further on, was actualized in the public narrative in 2018. On this basis, it is possible to analyze the assessment of the white and red forces within modern Finnish society, due to the higher interest to the Civil War in connection with the Jubilee data and comparatively larger number of sources on historic memory that have appeared in scientific discourse. In the interwar period, Finland saw the cult of the Civil (“Liberation”) War, where the red forces were presented as opponents of the independence of the state, and the whites, on the contrary, contributed to the acquisition of the sovereignty. However the statistical data, commemorative products, cultural phenomena presented in the article show that the public discourse about the Civil War tends to smooth the categorical evaluations, despite the fact that the discourse about the further Winter War and, moreover, the World War II tends to exacerbate the approach. The Finnish society is aware of the need to investigate crimes against the reds, preserves the memory of war crimes on both sides, and keeps the war graves of both Reds and Whites in the similar way. The rethinking of the legacy of civil confrontation is the potential for humanitarian dialogue between Russia and Finland.

Reviewed by: Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney David E. Goldberg Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 464.) Since its publication more than a decade ago, David Blight’s acclaimed Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory has gone for the most part unchallenged by scholars of Civil War memory. In the years that have followed, an exhaustive list of works have expounded upon, consolidated, and sometimes subtly questioned Blight’s assertion that Americans learned to forget the war by learning to forgive. Through monument building, plantation tours, and even marriage, citizens in the North and South chose to disregard the “hard hand of war” by embracing the sentimental notions of valor, heroism, and sacrifice. While Caroline Janney’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation examines many of these now familiar ritualistic and commemorative public sites, hers is the first comprehensive reassessment of Civil War memory. Spanning the first seventy-five years of the postwar period, she investigates the painstaking efforts Americans undertook to refuse the sentimentality of reconciliation. Remembering the Civil War is most impressive for its ability to unpack terms that have now become so synonymous with one another that they have seemingly lost all appropriate historical connection to their time. While many scholars have often used the terms “reunion” and “reconciliation” or “race” and “slavery” interchangeably, those who undertook the work of memorializing and debating the war did not. Reunion, Janney reminds us, was accomplished rather quickly, first in 1865, and later consolidated during Reconstruction. Yet, while former soldiers returned to commemorate past battles, their returning did not mean that they reconciled the war’s most divisive political disputes. According to Blight and others, reconciliation triumphed because many Americans learned to embrace a shared commitment to white supremacy, which helped neutralize sectional animosities and political differences. Janney challenges these assumptions by carefully surveying the pervasiveness of Unionist sentiments well into the twentieth century. Indeed, Remembering the Civil War extends the plot of Gary Gallagher’s recent book The Union War and Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by examining the diverse ways that Northern citizens retained the emancipationist legacy of the [End Page 94] Civil War despite their lingering support for Reconstruction and civil rights by the late nineteenth century. In countless ceremonies and dedications, former Union soldiers made clear that the demise of slavery was both the objective and achievement of the war, a triumph that could not be expunged despite the inescapable Northern commitment to white supremacy. Janney’s book also provides an opportunity to remember that debates over the Civil War’s meaning were as much between blacks and whites as they were between North and South. The ways in which Northerners learned to embrace segregation without forgetting emancipation is critical to understanding not only the distinctions between race and slavery that Janney so aptly describes, but is also crucial to examining how segregation unfolded and operated in the post–Civil War North. While many scholars have stressed a continuous white supremacy in their characterizations of Northern style Jim Crow, Remembering the Civil War reminds us that de facto segregation—as both an idea and a practice—endured because of the savvy and clever ways white Northerners contained and manipulated the historical narrative in their attempts to control social relations and economic rights in the public sphere. Finally, Remembering the Civil War provides an opportunity to rethink how we approach historical memory. Historians interested in Civil War memory might do well to leave behind the more popular ceremonial sites that have become all too predictable in discussions of reunion and reconciliation. Indeed, one might conclude that battlefields, plantation houses, and monuments are only temporary political artifacts and locations that tell us very little about how most citizens retained the Civil War’s enduring meanings. Most often, at these places citizens and tourists confront the war’s political disputes and legacy in short encounters, while more sustaining debates about the conflict play out in...

Civil Wars: A History in Ideas by David Armitage is a pioneering inquiry into the intellectual history of the concept of civil war from the Romans to the present day. It makes a great point in showing how civil war has been redefined for different strategic purposes across the ages, and how such instrumentalization has influenced the outcomes of battles and the content of historical narratives. Yet however mutable the divide between civil and international war is made to appear in this account, I argue that the drawing and redrawing of this divide would merit more attention if we want to come to terms with those conflicts in the past when it had not yet been articulated, and those conflicts in our present when it is in the process of being dissolved.