American Oracle 415mc

ebook 3j661n

By David W. Blight 1r2q2e

cover image of American Oracle

Sign up to save your library 4g436f

With an OverDrive , you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive s.

   Not today

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

 Libby on the App Store  Libby on Google Play

Search for a digital library with this title 353d38

Title found at these libraries: 67n5u

Library Name Distance
Loading...

"The ghosts of the Civil War never leave us, as David Blight knows perhaps better than anyone, and in this superb book he masterfully unites two distant but inextricably bound events."Ken Burns
Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, a century after the g of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, "One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free." He delivered this speech just three years after the Virginia Civil War Commission published a guide proclaiming that "the Centennial is no time for finding fault or placing blame or fighting the issues all over again."
David Blight takes his readers back to the centennial celebration to determine how Americans then made sense of the suffering, loss, and liberation that had wracked the United States a century earlier. Amid cold war politics and civil rights protest, four of America's most incisive writers explored the gulf between remembrance and reality. Robert Penn Warren, the southern-reared poet-novelist who recanted his of segregation; Bruce Catton, the journalist and U.S. Navy officer who became a popular Civil War historian; Edmund Wilson, the century's preeminent literary critic; and James Baldwin, the searing African-American essayist and activist—each exposed America's triumphalist memory of the war. And each, in his own way, demanded a reckoning with the tragic consequences it spawned.
Blight illuminates not only mid-twentieth-century America's sense of itself but also the dynamic, ever-changing nature of Civil War memory. On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the war, we have an invaluable perspective on how this conflict continues to shape the country's political debates, national identity, and sense of purpose.

American Oracle