Confederate Flag Research Articles

What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature

Professional historians can be an argumentative lot, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, a broad consensus regarding Civil War causation clearly reigned. Few mainstream scholars would deny that Abraham Lincoln got it right in his second inaugural address—that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. Public statements by preeminent historians reaffirmed that slavery’s centrality had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Writing for the popular Civil War magazine North and South in November 2000, James M. McPherson pointed out that during the war, “few people in either North or South would have dissented” from Lincoln’s slavery-oriented account of the war’s origins. In ten remarkably efficient pages, McPherson dismantled arguments that the war was fought over tariffs, states’ rights, or the abstract principle of secession. That same year, Charles Joyner penned a report on Civil War causation for release at a Columbia, South Carolina, press conference at the peak of the Palmetto State’s Confederate flag debate. Endorsed by dozens of scholars and later published in Callaloo, it concluded that the “historical record . . . clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.”

Essaying America: A Declaration of Independence

Early in his Meditations, Descartes suggests that, at least once, one should set one’s epistemic bushel in order, as if beliefs were apples to be sorted. But that is not quite right, even though he uses the image in his replies to the seventh set of objections. Descartes’s principal concern is not each and every belief but the ways in which he justifies them. It is thus not a stretch to find a kind of ethics of belief in the Meditations, at least with regard to scientia. (Regarding the epistemic challenges of everyday life, Descartes is quite clear in his synopsis that “no sane person ever seriously doubted these things,” i.e., “that there really is a world, and that humans have bodies and so on” [1984, 11].) At its heart, then, and all doctrine aside, Cartesian philosophy responds to a call that asks us to formulate a rational basis for our epistemic commitments. I feel a similar obligation, though my concern does not lie with how to conduct myself in the way of belief or, better yet, with how to formulate commitments to assertoric speech acts. In its briefest form, it runs, “Am I an American philosopher?” though that wording is infelicitous insofar Essaying America: A Declaration of Independence

Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (review)

Reviewed by: Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers Matthew C. Hulbert Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers. Steven R. Boyd. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8071-3685-0, 192 pp., cloth, $36.95. With Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War, Steven R. Boyd offers a seemingly untapped lens—or perhaps more appropriately, a series of interconnected lenses—through which we might more intimately examine the values, the ideologies, and the broader cultural environments of middle-class white men and women on both sides of the Civil War. Equal parts cultural history and art history, this study involves the laborious dissection and interpretation of specially embellished envelopes printed immediately before and during the war—with designs ranging from flags, eagles, and canons to Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Union president Abraham Lincoln facing off, shirtless, in an epic bare-knuckle boxing match. In the midst of all this symbolism, propaganda, sentiment, and extrapolation, Boyd attempts to piece together how such relatively small vestiges of material culture informed (and continue to inform) much larger themes of constructed nationalism, [End Page 125] evolving identities and, ultimately, how real people reacted to, interacted with, and perceived themselves in the broader context of a war that fiercely divided friends, families, neighbors, and states alike. Boyd illustrates the varied functions patriotic envelopes performed during the war. Aside from their most obvious roles as artistic promotions of patriotic sentiment, these envelopes also shed considerable light on the causes motivating war efforts on both sides. Acknowledging their greater importance to the Union, Boyd nonetheless argues that the envelopes charted both subtle and substantial changes in the tenor of both war efforts, as well as the degree to which citizens on both sides endorsed and internalized such intellectual and emotional shifts. As visual representations of the causes for war, Boyd essentially contends that patriotic envelopes constitute a slideshow in which symbolic imagery and consumer-approved meanings—from the Constitution itself to slaves playing active roles in their own emancipation—serve as a measuring stick for fluctuating social and political issues. In much the same way that patriotic envelopes visually chart how northerners understood and expressed their own motivations to fight, Boyd maintains that southern envelopes operate as indicators of Confederate nationalism and government efficiency. As printers rapidly designed and disseminated covers featuring the ever-evolving Confederate flag, Jefferson Davis, P. G. T. Beauregard, and even scenes depicting loyal slaves, the envelopes worked as a mechanism through which Confederate citizens, separated by geographic expanses and a painfully slow stream of news and information, became familiar with their new nation—its leaders, its causes, and symbols meant to ignite nationalist fervor. Included in this analysis are women and African Americans. Their images on the envelopes, however, seem to reveal the thoughts of white men more so than those of women on the home front or slaves fleeing the plantation. On one hand, Boyd proposes that imagery designed by northern printers of rebellious or escaping slaves illustrates a wider northern awareness of the role African Americans played in their own liberation. On the other hand, he hints that patriotic covers were a way for men to issue gendered behavioral protocols to women as men marched off to war and left them to manage farms, businesses, and homes. Both assertions, though vague at times concerning scale and impact, do, at the very least, underscore the ways these envelopes could, and likely did, operate as vehicles of popular thought and cultural expression. In many ways, the previous statement works as a microcosmic review of the book. Nearly all of the meanings and functions that Boyd extrapolates [End Page 126] from or assigns to patriotic envelopes are well-founded and thoroughly outlined and represent very plausible conclusions. Despite an admittedly limited chronology of envelopes—as vignettes indicative of the ideals, values, political actions, and even the self-perceptions of middle-class whites, North and South—Boyd’s arguments rest on solid ground. Though questions linger regarding the socioeconomic and/or geographic characteristics of this middle class and its larger representativeness, Boyd’s otherwise pragmatic analysis constitutes...

Catfish and Home

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I was never much for baseball. It wasn't that I hated the sport. I simply had no skill for it. A pop-fly to my left field usually went uncaught--never mind my batting. I was tall, arms hung apelike from my body, and my movements were too stretched out, languid flourishes that were useless, I wasn't built for it. But in Hertford, North Carolina, where baseball hung in every home, office, classroom, and service station, a boy like me had little else to choose from. Hertford was baseball. Some would say our sleepy hometown fell in love with the game when America fell for in the 1960s and '70s. Jimmy Catfish Hunter, a local hero, pitched for the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees (helping them to three straight pennants), played in the World Series six times, made eight All-Star teams, won 224 games, and in 1987 was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame--all the while maintaining his small-town farming roots: his Hertford roots. His professional career spanned 1965 to 1979, and in that time, he became Hertford's Prometheus, our link to the gods. He played every game with the shotgun pellets from a childhood hunting accident lodged in his foot, the result of winter mornings in the woods, doe-urine-splashed boots from stalking prey until nightfall, and natives imagined he held a major piece of them in his cleats. When he came back home for good at the age o f thirty-three, he was royalty. The winner o f the Cy Young Award, pitcher of a perfect game in '68, the subject of a Bob Dylan song, a titan in our town. Because of Catfish, Hertford had a name. It would be remembered. Hertford did have its own appeal, most of which was lost on me growing up. It's a simple town. It still retains a kind of calm, a repose all too swiftly fading (yet still lingering on southern back roads). It's one of the first permanent settlements in North Carolina, dating to the late 1600s, and home to one of the oldest buildings in the state: the Newbold-White House. Impressive Victorian and Georgian homes still mark the road winding along the Perquimans River. Tall, pillared structures framed by magnolias or weeping willows. Adorned in Spanish moss, cypress trees, melancholy and stoic, stand in the shallow water, osprey nesting in their limbs. An old 1950s-style malt shop thrives downtown. Dogbox-equipped flatbeds line the shoulders of various side roads, as hunters discuss the goings-on of whatever game is in season. There's racial tension, to be sure, but it simmers quietly--the surface somehow mostly still. The air practically carries southern ease, a cliche aura of small-town familiarity, as people meet and greet with smiles and how do's comfortable in their everyday routine. And that might've been image enough, but legislators and local business owners wanted to parade Hertford's quality. What would Hertford be without Catfish? A great mural now greets all who drive through downtown, homage to various aspects of our town's history and so-called progress. There is, of course, a giant Yankees cap with a ball poised before it in the very center of the painted wall, a peculiar icon for a small, southern town if you don't know its history. Beside it stands a Civil War soldier saluting an imposing Confederate flag, the source of much debate today. A silhouette of two Pilgrim settlers in the foreground, and to the left a Native American perches on a cliff above the river, watching two boys play in metal buckets. From that river a famous log juts forth with three turtles sunning lazily atop it. A tacky and, to some, offensive masterpiece, no doubt, but it remains endearing to most locals--evidence of context for a hero, proof the town exists. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We would see Hertford's hero around town at times--in the pharmacy, at the Hertford Cafe or local ball games--and he was usually pleasant. would smile and wave if he knew us, or simply tip his hat. …

How Exposure to the Confederate Flag Affects Willingness to Vote for Barack Obama

Leading up to the 2008 U.S. election, pundits wondered whether Whites, particularly in Southern states, were ready to vote for a Black president. The present paper explores how a common Southern symbol—the Confederate flag—impacted willingness to vote for Barack Obama. We predicted that exposure to the Confederate flag would activate negativity toward Blacks and result in lowered willingness to vote for Obama. As predicted, participants primed with the Confederate flag reported less willingness to vote for Obama than those primed with a neutral symbol. The flag did not affect willingness to vote for White candidates. In a second study, participants primed with the Confederate flag evaluated a hypothetical Black target more negatively than controls. These results suggest that exposure to the Confederate flag results in more negative judgments of Black targets. As such, the prevalence of this flag in the South may have contributed to a reticence for some to vote for Obama because of his race.

Rethinking the Boundaries of the South

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] John Shelton Reed's work in the 1970s and afterward demonstrated the decline in the prevalence of in business names across the South. Although D.C.'s Dixie Theater --here, ca. 1920--might suggest there once had been a case for conceptually situating the nation's capitol in the South, Reeds work over fifty years later determined a region comprising Oklahoma, Kentucky, and the eleven states of the Old Confederacy. Many sociologists--and the US. Census--continue to locate D. C. in the South. Photograph courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress. Some states just don't feel all that southern anymore. Take Virginia as an example. Virginia is the birthplace of Robert E. Lee and the capital of the Confederacy. Two hundred years ago there was little doubt that Virginia was not only southern but, arguably, the core of the region. Today, however, many inhabitants of the Old Dominion state seem more like they belong in the Northeast than in the South. In Northern Virginia, where residents are more likely to be career government bureaucrats than members of industries that have long driven the southern economy, attachment to the South seems to be declining. Similar stories can be written about the decline of southern identity in North Carolina's Research Triangle and Florida's burgeoning 1-4 corridor. In substantial portions of these states, sushi-grade tuna and low-fat mocha lattes are taking their place beside barbecue and sweet tea. Demographically, these peripheral South states have experienced an influx of Latinos and a decline in the proportion of native southerners. These demographic shifts have resulted in political outcomes different from the majority of the (solid Republican) South, including support for then-Democratic candidate Barack Obama in 2008. (1) Contrast these three states with places like Oklahoma and Kentucky. Neither was part of the Confederacy, yet both possess cultural characteristics that look a lot like the other states in the traditional South. Toby Keith, perhaps the best-known country musician today, hails from Oklahoma and wears his southern identity like a badge of honor, releasing an album titled Shock'n Y' all and frequently appearing in his music videos alongside a Confederate flag. Political scientists Gary Copeland, Rebecca Cruise, and Ronald Keith Gaddie agree that Oklahoma is increasingly southern, citing the growth in the Republican Party and the Christian Right as prime examples of Oklahoma's regional identity. They argue that Oklahoma--then an Indian territory--was not a state at the time of the Civil War, but many of the events and cultural factors that structure Oklahoma politics are distinctly (2) A similar story can be written about Kentucky. Classic country singer Tom T. Hall, who once sang about old dogs, children, and watermelon wine, is from Kentucky, and his songs have a distinctly southern flair. Similarly, few things are more southern than two staples of Kentucky culture--Jim Beam bourbon whiskey and Colonel Harland Sanders's original recipe. Recent political events in these states, with John McCain and Sarah Palin dominating the 2008 presidential elections in both, follow historical patterns and thus feel traditionally southern. Of course, these limited examples do not unequivocally demonstrate that a state is or is not southern, but that these singers, cultural trends, and political outcomes are indicative of threads of southernness that run through these peripheral South states. As we grapple with where the South is today, we turn to a long and distinguished research tradition for help. This line of inquiry rests on two key assumptions. Following distinguished sociologist John Shelton Reed and others, we believe that there is a southern otherness. Although the South was once closer to the mainstream of the country, it began to diverge by the middle of the seventeenth century, and today, the South differs demographically, economically, politically, and, most important for our purposes, culturally. …

The Impact of Explicit Racial Cues on Gender Differences in Support for Confederate Symbols and Partisanship

Researchers have argued that explicit racial appeals are rejected in contemporary American politics because they are perceived as violating the norm of racial equality. We test this claim with an experimental design, embedded in a representative survey of Georgia where, until recently, the state flag featured the Confederate battle emblem. In our experiment, we manipulate the salience of racial cues in news accounts of the state flag controversy in Georgia. We hypothesize that women are more likely than men to reject explicit racial appeals. We focus on the effects of explicit messages in two areas: support for Confederate symbols and identification with the Democratic Party. As hypothesized, when the racial significance of this debate is made explicit support for the Confederate flag declines, but only among women. Similarly, explicit appeals lead to lower levels of Democratic identification among men, but among women the effects are weaker and less consistent.

Charleston's Irish labourers and their move into the Confederacy

In 1861, thousands of recently arrived Irish immigrants marched off to battlefields like Petersburg, Sharpsburg, and Cold Harbor carrying Confederate flags and Irish banners. Most, like those from Charleston, South Carolina, were not slave holders but young, impoverished, unskilled workers. Their motives remain shrouded in mystery. Were they hapless pawns of the powerful slave-owning elite? What were they fighting for? What was it in their view of the world that brought them to the decision to join the Confederate forces? The answer is embedded in their past experiences, current social relations, and sense of identity. In part, Charleston's Irish workers brought the memory of social exclusion with them to America and struggled to write a different history on Southern soil. Their position as free, white workers in a slave society and their constructed and publicly reinforced identity as exiled patriots and dutiful sons of their new homeland influenced their actions on the eve of the Civil War. In this essay, Irish workers' motivations and sense of identity are revealed through an analysis of the toasts and charters of Charleston's Irish fraternal organisations, the doctrines of the Southern Catholic Church, and the characters and songs of the theatre.

Race discourse and the US Confederate Flag

Research reveals that racial hierarchies and ‘color‐blind’ racism is maintained through discourse. The current study utilizes exploratory data from focus groups in a predominantly white southern university in the United States to examine race talk, the Confederate Flag, and the construction of southern white identity. Drawing from critical discourse analysis, we answer the following questions: first, to what extent do discursive strategies surrounding the Confederate Flag reflect more subtle forms of racism? Second, what does discourse surrounding use of the Confederate Flag reveal about the construction of southern white identity? Findings reveal that whiteness remains largely an ‘unmarked’ category as demonstrated via discursive strategies (downplaying and defensive diversions versus race competence). Educators, especially in the American south, may benefit from examinations of controversies over the US Confederate Flag in order to challenge racism in the classroom.

Southern Rockers

Southern Rockers Joshua Guthman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution It is impossible to overlook the shame of the Stars and Bars, but what about the sound of the music itself? There lies glory. Lynyrd Skynyrd in concert, New Brockton, Alabama, 2008, courtesy of Jayuzi, under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License. [End Page 141] Let’s be honest: Southern rock is a critically despised genre, a redneck sound draped in the Confederate flag and fueled by an oh-so-’70s mix of Jack Daniels and Quaaludes. But the genre’s critics have it only partly right. It is impossible to overlook the shame of the Stars and Bars, but what about the sound of the music itself? There lies glory—especially if you turn it up real loud. 10. The Allman Brothers Band The genre’s progenitors? I wouldn’t be so quick to place the Allmans at the moment of creation. But it is true they exhibit all that is good and bad about southern rock—the heady mix of blues, rock, country, and soul, on the one hand, and the never-ending on-stage “jam” burdening that other hand like so much deadweight. 9. Lynyrd Skynyrd Only Elvis’s music lies buried beneath more heaps of cultural symbolism. But that’s what you get for playing in front of the Rebel flag and sparring with Neil Young over the meaning of southern manhood. 8. Lucinda Williams Oh, she can sing it sweet, but, Lord, have you heard Williams when she plugs in? A voice like a branding iron. 7. Uncle Tupelo The Rust Belt meets the Bible Belt. The post-industrial descendants of the white southern migrants who found themselves exiled to the steel mills and automobile factories of the Midwest. 6. Gram Parsons The pre-eminent country-rocker, a radiant songwriter, and a man who died far too young. Did you know that his corpse was stolen and set alight in the deserts of California before it could be flown back to New Orleans for burial? Talk about southern gothic. 5. The Sir Douglas Quintet They hailed from Texas and summoned the sounds of Mexico. But, please, don’t call ’em Tex-Mex. Makes their music sound like a bowl of bad chili when in fact they were serving up the sweetest stew of borderland soul imaginable. 4. Drive-By Truckers Latter-day chroniclers of what they call “the duality of the southern thing.” [End Page 142] Click for larger view View full resolution She can sing it sweet, but, Lord, have you heard her when she plugs in? A voice like a branding iron. Lucinda Williams, at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, England, 2008, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License. 3. The Band “They’re from Canada!” you scream. “The South ’tis but a state of mind,” I reply. 2. Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (a.k.a. The Swampers) Unseen but always heard. The house band at fame Studios before opening up their own shop in 1969, these guys laid down the beats behind (take a deep breath) Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Bob Seger, Willie Nelson, the Staple Singers, Traffic, the Oak Ridge Boys, Paul Simon, and Rod Stewart, among others. 1. Elvis Presley The original southern rocker. The great white whale of American culture, in Greil Marcus’s words: a musician, an idea, a force, a living metaphor of the sins and virtues of the South. [End Page 143] Joshua Guthman Joshua Guthman is the music editor of Southern Cultures and an assistant professor of history at Berea College, where he teaches American cultural and religious history. He is writing a book about Primitive Baptists and the evangelical self in antebellum America. Copyright © 2009 Center for the Study of the American South

Symbolic hate: Intention to intimidate, political ideology, and group association.

In Virginia v. Black (123 S.Ct. 1536, 2003), the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not bar statutes that prohibit cross burnings in which defendants acted with intention to intimidate others. Using a variety of symbols including cross burnings, swastikas, confederate flags, and skin fists, the current research tested how mock jurors used alternative actor intentions to judge culpability in symbolic hate speech cases. Only partially validating the Court's assumptions, participants rated guilt certainty highest when they believed the speakers conveyed direct threats, sometimes regardless of whether defendants intended to intimidate others. Further, results showed the level of perceived intimidation only partially mediated the relationship between type of fact pattern and guilt certainty ratings. While alternative intentions did produce different levels of intention to intimidate, path analysis showed that the participants' ratings of the defendant's intention to convey a direct threat influenced guilt certainty ratings in all cases. Perceived intimidation levels predicted culpability in only some of the cases and not for cross burning on private property.

The effects of sensitive symbols on class project selection decisions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to test the idea that symbols can serve as a cue to group membership and to assess discrimination towards working with individuals displaying certain symbols – the ichthus, the gay pride symbol and the Confederate flag.Design/methodology/approachThis study looked at one particular method (i.e. clothing worn) of revealing one's attitude towards an issue or group, such as the Confederacy or Christianity. This study was designed to test selection preferences for three different symbols each against a control group. The experimental independent variable of symbol had four levels (control, ichthus, gay pride triangle, and Confederate flag). Two subject variables were tested as moderating variables (ethnic identity and Christian identity). Each of these was measured via a questionnaire, and a median split on scores was used to create two groups: strong and weak identity for each scale. The dependent variable was the selection preference for the target individual. Participants were 265 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory psychology and management classes.FindingsIt was confirmed that there are many signs that people give off in their verbal and non‐verbal behavior that reveal bits and pieces of their personality and ideologies.Originality/valueThe discrimination that students showed in this study reveals the importance of training those who may go into management roles and be involved in selection decisions to be aware of their natural tendencies to categorize people and the behavioral outcomes this can have.

On Flags and Fraternities: Lessons on Cultural Memory and Historical Amnesia in Charles Chesnutt's "Po' Sandy"

I think South, which I love, and then I think racist, which I hate, and those two ideas are stuck together in this flag--forever. --Mary Elizabeth, Any Day Now come up to courthouse, and I see flag waving there. This flag ain't like one got at school. This one here ain't got but a handful of stars. One at school got a big pile of stars--one for every state. --James, in Ernest Gaines' Sky Is Gray When Pat Buchanan remarked several years ago that if there is room for We shall overcome in our country, then there is room for Confederate flag, I was struck again by obtuseness of his (and others') failure to see why flag flown by an army fighting to preserve slavery (albeit among issues) is offensive, not only to descendants of slaves but also to all who find institution reprehensible--like writer Reynolds Price, for example, who argues against, simply put, offending others: As a white native of Warren County, North Carolina, who was born only 68 years after end of Civil War and slavery; as a man who knew several elderly men and women who had been born slaves; and as great-grandson of at least one slaveowner, I can see no appropriate present use for any of several Confederate flags outside a museum or a serious historical film or dramatic reenactment that makes no attempt to defend rebel cause. Perhaps a few generations from now stain of which so appallingly blots entire Confederate enterprise, will have faded in its power to offend; but as direct descendant of many otherwise decent souls who supported awful machine of slavery and who defended their holdings against Union forces, I'd have to say that any present display of flag in situations than those named above seems to me a moral insult. (155) Around time that Buchanan and others began to defend Confederate flag against those who would have it taken down from state buildings (the mid-1990s), I found myself bringing up issue of flying Confederate flag when teaching Charles Waddell Chesnutt's conjure tale Po' Sandy. In Po' Sandy, Chesnutt illuminates clearly how a symbol of Old South--whether it be a kitchen built off of main house, as in Chesnutt's story, or a Confederate flag--cannot be separated from history of slavery and just represent romantic side of time period or southern pride. Not only should one not ignore not-so-romantic side of coin, reality of that other side reveals illusory nature of romance. As Louis Rubin writes, There is nothing sentimental or pathetic about heritage of Civil War. What it is is tragic--people, most of them ordinary, decent people, fighting hard and well for a cause that was basically wrong. Thank God it was lost (46). In her book Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in Imagined South, Tara McPherson suggests that, while Americans seem to recognize the horrors of slavery, we remain unable to connect this past to romanticized history of plantation .... The brutalities of those periods remain dissociated from our representations of material site of those atrocities, plantation (3). Chesnutt's short story illustrates that romanticizing plantation home goes back at least as far as nineteenth century--indeed, for as long as romance writers have used Old South as a setting for their books and entertained readers with their sentimentalized portrayal of that place and time. Po' Sandy is second story in Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899). The reader learns in first story, Goophered Grapevine, that John, white narrator of each story's frame, and Annie, his wife, have recently moved to North Carolina from North. Subtleties in Goophered Grapevine reveal that although move was ostensibly made for Annie's health, it also allows John to take advantage of cheap land and labor in post-Civil War South. …

Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South

Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South Susan V. Donaldson (bio) Talk not about kind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them. —J. W. C. Pennington Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of the legacies of Jim Crow's demise would be the remaking of American history—and stories about that remaking as well. "[W]e have reached a great crisis in American history," he declared at the 1968 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, "and we are now going to have a full American history. . . . Here in the United States we have had a political system which wouldn't allow me to tell my story officially. Much of it is not in the history textbooks" (qtd. in West 125). African Americans resorted accordingly to oral tradition for the preservation of memories and histories "even as," Ellison added, "they were forced to accommodate themselves to those forces and arrangements that were sanctioned by official history." The result in black writing, he noted drily, was "a high sensitivity to the ironies of historical writing" and "a profound skepticism concerning the validity of most reports on what the past was like" (126). These are words that anticipate to a startling degree our current debates over memories and histories of slavery and race, from controversies over Confederate flags and memorials to Brown University's recent directive to study its own history of complicity with the Atlantic slave trade. Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the [End Page 267] antebellum white South's systematic blockade of abolitionist literature, then by charges of fraud and imposture by proslavery apologists, and finally by what art historian Kirk Savage calls "the erasure of slavery" in public history—in Confederate monuments, museums, and sites of historic preservation (129). Toni Morrison, for one, has seen it as her specific charge to search out those silences "for the unspeakable things unspoken" and finally to retrieve them from the realm of the forgotten and give them voice ("Unspeakable" 210). But there are also issues that have generated furious arguments since the publication of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner: that is, what is it that stories and histories of slavery should say, what narrative forms should they take, who should write them—and for what audiences? These are questions that have provided much of the impetus for new categories of writing about slavery, the most notable of which are novels like Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada and Morrison's Beloved, often referred to as "neo-slave narratives." Two 2003 novels, Edward P. Jones' Pulitzer Prize-winning The Known World and Valerie Martin's Orange Prize-winning Property, suggest yet another category: that of post- or anti-plantation tradition novels drawing inspiration in part from the tradition of slave narratives, especially those by Solomon Northup, Henry Box Brown, and William and Ellen Craft, but also from the necessity of responding to and writing against the long shadow cast by Gone with the Wind on popular memories of slavery, the antebellum South, and the Civil War era. Indeed these two novels cast their sights farther afield by interrogating mastery itself, and by implication master narratives of history, by exposing the daily operations and limits of power and domination, excavating the counternarratives blocked by those operations, and ultimately revising both the content and the form of the historical record. The Known World and Property, then, are not just historical novels. They are postmodern novels written for a postmodern South and a postmodern age—with all the connotations of a loss of mastery that term "postmodern" carries. For if all of our current debates on slavery reparations, Confederate flags, and historical monuments tell us anything, it is that the white South and white America, for that matter, have been suffering a crisis of authority and legitimacy ever since the civil rights revolution, a crisis that has seen the demise of master narratives that justified and acquiesced to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy and rendered African Americans virtually silent and invisible...

Knoxville: A Civil War within the Civil War

Knoxville:A Civil War within the Civil War Sharon A. Roger Hepburn (bio) Robert Tracy McKenzie. Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 234 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. On October 24, 1863, the front page of Harper's Weekly featured a front-page illustration entitled "The War in East Tennessee—Reception of General Burnside by the Unionists of Knoxville." This illustration depicts General Burnside surrounded by a throng of men, women, and children welcoming him and the Union troops as they enter the city behind him. Following the illustration is a letter written by a Union soldier to his father that describes the Union army's advance through eastern Tennessee into Knoxville: we were greeted everywhere with shouts for the Union, cheers for the old flag, and the most unmistakable evidences of loyalty. At every house the entire family would appear, often with buckets of fresh water and fruit for the welcome Yankees, and some of the people would scarcely ask for pay for the forage which we had seized to feed our animals, although the corn we had taken was all they had to look to for their winter's food. . . . [A]s we entered Knoxville it was past all description. The people seemed frantic with joy . . . after two years of servitude under the most tyrannical despotism, they now hold up their heads and thank God they are free.1 The perception impressed by the illustration and accompanying letter is that all of Knoxville turned out for a hero's welcome for the Union army. A more accurate portrayal of civil war Knoxville, that which inspired Robert McKenzie's Lincolnites and Rebels, is a drawing sketched by a contemporary Knoxville resident. The sketch depicts a large gathering of Unionists near a U.S. flag on one end of the street and another throng of men at the other end of the street gathered around a Confederate flag. One town, one street, two simultaneous rallies; manifest of the divided loyalties that tore more than just the nation apart. This confliction is the heart of Lincolnites and Rebels. McKenzie's description of Knoxville as a civil war within the Civil War is appropriate. Knoxville, its prewar population at just over 4,000, was surrounded by a countryside predominant with Unionists acting as a fifth column within the heart of the Confederacy. [End Page 48] McKenzie examines the divided loyalties manifested in East Tennessee, specifically Knoxville, throughout the Civil War. The primary focus of Lincolnites and Rebels is what impact the war had on the lives of the citizenry of Knoxville. Lincolnites and Rebels does not tell the story of the Civil War from Washington or Richmond. It is not a story of generals pitting their strategies against one another on the battlefield. Neither is this the tale of soldiers in blue or gray. McKenzie tells the human side of a people and a nation at war. McKenzie vividly portrays Knoxville as a microcosm of the Civil War as a brothers' war, dividing families, friends, and neighbors. Some of the issues addressed by McKenzie are the nature of loyalty in the presence of the enemy, the effect the conflict had on the lives of the citizenry, and the nature of the town's division between Unionist and Confederate. As McKenzie notes in his Introduction, it is an unthinking decision of most contemporary Tennesseans that they are "Southern" and as such should wear gray not blue uniforms when reenacting the Civil War or dressing up as soldiers. Suppressed within the memory of gallant southern soldiers in gray defending against the hordes of Yankee oppressors is the reality that Tennessee was a border state, and within that border state, loyalties were divided. McKenzie adeptly describes Knoxville as a community caught in the middle between North and South, slave and free, Union and Confederate. And as the tide of the war turned during the four-year struggle, the citizenry were wrenched to and fro. At one point or another during the bloody national struggle, residents of Knoxville found their allegiance, whether it be to Union or Confederate, sorely tested. McKenzie pursues...

Restoration, Metanostalgia, and Critical Memory: Forms of Nostalgia in Contemporary Southern Poetry

White southerners and their literature traditionally have been known for nostalgia (sometimes even defined by it), and contemporary southern poetry does not escape its influence. In fact, nostalgia is arguably most prevalent paradigm of current southern poetics, even as much post-World War II verse works in contrast pathos-laden view of past. A collection of recent southern poets--including those under analysis in this article, George Scarbrough, Donald Justice, and Henry Taylor--make use of inheritance of southern nostalgia, though not necessarily in traditional ways. They demonstrate nostalgia remains driving force in poetry of postwar era even or especially as U.S. South begins operate under shifting conditions of trans-southernism: increased (sub)urbanization, influence of late capitalism, pressures of racial conflict manifested in civil rights movement and continuing efforts at desegregation, as well as claims of current identity politics. Though at times their poetic measures can become reactionary measures, preserving mummified past from such cultural transitions, these poets also show signs of more jagged nostalgia, one struggles come terms with this changing South: old times there are not forgotten, hut re-viewed with different, even distrustful eye. Southern nostalgia can take seemingly innocuous form of moonlight-and-magnolias yearning for more peaceful and reassuring past, often centered on wish return homestead, physical and symbolic space merges southern staples of ties family and place, perhaps intensifying into shrine for ancestor worship. Such pining for more organic time and place may seem harmless enough, but it can also take on ideological import; for retreating into past can elide pressing social realities of present. This is apparent in ongoing conflicts over politics of nostalgia for Lost Cause, seen most vividly in continuing battle over flying of Confederate flag on South Carolina State House grounds. Waxing nostalgic can be racially inflected and politically weighted act. Nostalgia's backward-glancing would seem run counter continuously shifting identifications of increasingly transregional and global world, forming conservative defense mechanism against contemporary culture's overflow of meanings by positing singular meaningfulness of sturdy, unified past. A starting point in defining nostalgia might be Michael Kammen's understanding of it as essentially history without guilt, sense of heritage that suffuses us with pride rather than with shame (688). Although nostalgia can function as sentimental balm salve wounds of more divisive historical conflict, we should use this definition press beyond out-of-hand neo-Marxist condemnation of nostalgia, as seems at best incomplete. Current theorists offer range of perspectives on nostalgia as both method of cultural retreat and critique. From Greek nostos, to return home, and algia, a sorrowful or distressing condition or illness, nostalgia is literally state of homesickness. (1) By twentieth century, concept had been gradually stripped of its medical associations and took on more pejorative meaning as the useless yearning for world or for way of life from which one has been irrevocably severed (Starobinski 101). Whereas there is undoubtedly good deal of truth involved in this typical definition, nostalgia is not univocal phenomenon, but contains multiple, even contradictory levels. Svetlana Boym proposes two contrasting impulses of nostalgic desire: restorative versus reflective nostalgia. In its uncritical restorative sense, nostalgia can become an abdication of personal responsibility, guilt-free homecoming, ethical and aesthetic failure (xiv). Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts transhistorical reconstruction of lost home (xviii), while reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, longing itself, and delays homecoming--wistfully, ironically, desperately. …

Cultural contestation in ethnic conflict

Ethnic conflict often focuses on culturally charged symbols and rituals that evoke strong emotions from all sides. Marc Howard Ross examines battles over diverse cultural expressions, including Islamic headscarves in France, parades in Northern Ireland, holy sites in Jerusalem and Confederate flags in the American South to propose a psychocultural framework for understanding ethnic conflict, as well as barriers to, and opportunities for, its mitigation. His analysis explores how culture frames interests, structures demand-making and shapes how opponents can find common ground to produce constructive outcomes to long-term disputes. He focuses on participants' accounts of conflict to identify emotionally significant issues, and the power of cultural expressions to link individuals to larger identities and shape action. Ross shows that, contrary to popular belief, culture does not necessarily exacerbate conflict; rather, the constructed nature of psychocultural narratives can facilitate successful conflict mitigation through the development of more inclusive narratives and identities.

Refuting Exile: Rita Dove Reading Melvin B. Tolson

Refuting ExileRita Dove Reading Melvin B. Tolson Diana V. Cruz (bio) Sometimes in this homogenizing age of mass media (when plenty of people just want to look like the characters in “Friends”), we tend to forget that many Americans are confronted daily with the very difference of their own heritage. —Rita Dove Rita Dove’s work, more than is widely recognized, suggests that racial specificity is a necessary element in the writer’s craft, rather than a rupture in a seamless, universal language of art. To posit Dove’s “transcendence” of race as the ultimate sign of her excellence is to undermine the African-American tradition of writing which foregrounds and explores blackness and to perpetuate the myth that racial identity has played no real part in the formation of mainstream American literature. Instead, Dove’s oeuvre instructs us to consider “a kind of poetic consciousness of occupied space—of the space we inhabit, of the shape of thought and the pressure of absence” (15), as she argues in The Poet’s World. “Each poem,” she says, “has its house of sound, its own geographical reverberations” (18). This regard for space and the intersections of writers, readers, language, and the “reverberations” of inestimable forces exerting pressure on the writer’s page lends a rousing complexity to all of Dove’s work, including her reviews of other poets and writers. Dove’s introduction to “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson is a definitive contribution to the debate about the Negroness or blackness of Tolson’s work. In opposition to critics who have often interpreted a transcendence of race in Tolson’s work, Dove defines his use of black tropes and traditions while identifying what she calls “the multitudes” in his poetry. Dove’s translation of Tolson’s work demonstrates that its epth and breadth are based on—not present despite—its explicit racial signification. The habit of translation that admits Dove’s and Tolson’s works into the realm of Great Art based on the assumption that they move beyond race provides only a conditional acceptance upon which the threat of expulsion looms. If black writers like Dove and Tolson are granted a stay on the literary mainland because critics feel their race will not interrupt the status quo, then such translations actually situate them as potential exiles. Because of their success as writers, it is difficult to imagine Dove or Tolson as an exile.1 They both, for example, would become published authors whose work was solicited by the White House. Further, each would earn the title of Poet Laureate—Dove in the United States and Tolson in the West-African nation of Liberia. Both received honorary doctorates from their undergraduate institutions, Miami University in Ohio and Lincoln University in [End Page 789] Pennsylvania, respectively. Tolson also was awarded a chair in the humanities at Tuskegee where, it turns out, Dove taught for one semester as a writer-in-residence (Dove, Poet’s World 93). All of these accomplishments firmly situate Dove and Tolson among their literary peers. And yet, ironically, some critical translations of these poets’ achievements separate them from that part of their cultural and literary heritage that most significantly contributes to their power as artists. Both poets have written compellingly, for example, about encounters in the South where they both witnessed elevated levels of racial tension. As Dove explains, her marriage to German novelist Fred Viebahn “had occasioned raised eyebrows or disdaining glances before, but never had we been exposed to such fiercely hateful glares” (Dove, Poet’s World 93). And the hate in those glares would erupt into action: Once Fred and I were driving back from Tuskegee after a dusting of snow had canceled classes. Near Auburn University, in front of a fraternity house “garnished” with a large Confederate flag, we had to slow down in order to pass by throngs of frat boys waging a snowball fight; when they saw who we were, they blocked the street, began hurling snowballs at our car, and screamed epithets I was too scared to actually understand and which Fred was reluctant to repeat to me later. “No way you bastards!” Fred muttered, and...

Freedom to Hate

ABSTRACT River Run High School, located in rural west central Florida, was the site for a case study of student conflict precipitated by the wearing and display of Confederate flags on campus. Following a series of tense student encounters over Confederate and other racist symbols, a conflict resolution team was invited to intervene. Team members created a series of student dialogues involving the principal disputants. Conversations revealed the basis of the conflict emanated from misunderstandings over history, stereotypical views of different ethnic groups, and inadequate lines of communication. While acknowledging the role for creating a climate of respect among students on campus, legal precedents have established students' rights to freedom of speech and expression that protect unpopular ideas. Tension and conflict on campus over free speech can be mitigated through ongoing dialogues among diverse segments of the student population.

Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Sport, Identity, and the Confederate Flag in the Dixie South

The study examines the significance of the Confederate flag in the local sport cultures of the American South. Building on a growing body of research related to sport, Whiteness, and the formation of local identity, this article questions how and why the Confederate signifier remains a contested, yet meaningful, symbol in the spaces and spectacles of the South’s most Confederate-emblazoned sporting institution: the University of Mississippi’s football team (the Ole Miss Rebels). Informed by (1) a critical historiography and (2) an exhaustive ethnography conducted from 2004 to 2006, this article mediates on the intersection of an exclusionary history and contemporary signifying acts of Dixie South Whiteness articulated through the sporting local. It concludes with a brief discussion on the international expansion of the flag’s sporting import.