Abstract
In literal terms, no one alive in the twenty-first century remembers the American Civil War. William Marvel’s 1991 article in Blue and Gray dated the death of the last Civil War veteran, a Union man, at 1956. 1 A child born on the day of the Confederate surrender would have had to have lived to just shy of 135 years to have seen in the present century. This war has, however, remained part of a national and international memory despite there being no living person today able to say “I was there.” What we “remember,” then, is perhaps more accurately described as what we perceive or believe about the Civil War, principally composed of a plethora of stories, images, and icons, factual and fictional, from a relatively finite range of public and published forms, among these being school textbooks, memorial and heritage sites, memoirs, academic publishing, television documentaries, and narrative cinema. 2
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Notes
Paul Grainge, ed., Memory and Popular Film (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1.
John Storey, “The Articulation of Memory and Desire: From Vietnam to the War in the Persian Gulf,” in Paul Grainge, ed., Memory and Popular Film (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 104.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 201.
See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [ 1952 ] 1992).
Stuart McConnell, “Epilogue: The Geography of Memory,” in Alice Fahs and John Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 265.
Gary Edgerton, “Ken Burns’ Rebirth of a Nation: Television, Narrative, and Popular History,” Film and History, 22 (December, 1992): 127.
Daniel O’Brien, Clint Eastwood: Film -Maker (London: B.T. Batsford, 1996), 14.
Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 287.
William Beard, Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2000), 15.
Gina Herring, “The Beguiled : Misogynist Myth or Feminist Fable?” Literature / Film Quarterly 26, no. 1998: 214–219 (quotation p. 215).
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© 2013 Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Barrett, J. (2013). Glory, Glory : Hollywood’s Consensus Memory of the American Civil War. In: Morgan, I.W., Davies, P.J. (eds) Reconfiguring the Union. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336484_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336484_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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