Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause PDF Author: Christopher Alan Graham
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813948819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause is a new history of Richmond’s famous St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, attended by Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War and a tourist magnet thereafter. Christopher Alan Graham’s narrative—which emerged out of St. Paul’s History and Reconciliation Initiative—charts the congregation’s theological and secular views of race from the church’s founding in 1845 to the present day, exploring the church’s complicity in Lost Cause narratives and racial oppression in Richmond. Graham investigates the ways that the actions of elite white southerners who imagined themselves as benevolent—liberal, even—in their treatment of Black people through the decades obscured the actual damage to Black bodies and souls that this ostensible liberalism caused. Placing the legacy of St. Paul’s self-described benevolent paternalism in dialogue with the racial and religious geography of Richmond, Graham reflects on what an authentic process of recognition and reparations might be, drawing useful lessons for America writ large.

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause PDF Author: Christopher Alan Graham
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813948819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book

Book Description
Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause is a new history of Richmond’s famous St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, attended by Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War and a tourist magnet thereafter. Christopher Alan Graham’s narrative—which emerged out of St. Paul’s History and Reconciliation Initiative—charts the congregation’s theological and secular views of race from the church’s founding in 1845 to the present day, exploring the church’s complicity in Lost Cause narratives and racial oppression in Richmond. Graham investigates the ways that the actions of elite white southerners who imagined themselves as benevolent—liberal, even—in their treatment of Black people through the decades obscured the actual damage to Black bodies and souls that this ostensible liberalism caused. Placing the legacy of St. Paul’s self-described benevolent paternalism in dialogue with the racial and religious geography of Richmond, Graham reflects on what an authentic process of recognition and reparations might be, drawing useful lessons for America writ large.

Baptized in Blood

Baptized in Blood PDF Author: Charles Reagan Wilson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820306819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Charles Reagan Wilson documents that for over half a century there existed not one, but two civil religions in the United States, the second not dedicated to honoring the American nation. Extensively researched in primary sources, Baptized in Blood is a significant and well-written study of the South’s civil religion, one of two public faiths in America. In his comparison, Wilson finds the Lost Cause offered defeated Southerners a sense of meaning and purpose and special identity as a precarious but distinct culture. Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a separate political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. “Civil religion” has been defined as the religious dimension of a people that enables them to understand a historical experience in transcendent terms. In this light, Wilson explores the role of religion in postbellum southern culture and argues that the profound dislocations of Confederate defeat caused southerners to think in religious terms about the meaning of their unique and tragic experience. The defeat in a war deemed by some as religious in nature threw into question the South’s relationship to God; it was interpreted in part as a God-given trial, whereby suffering and pain would lead Southerners to greater virtue and strength and even prepare them for future crusades. From this reflection upon history emerged the civil religion of the Lost Cause. While recent work in southern religious history has focused on the Old South period, Wilson’s timely study adds to our developing understanding of the South after the Civil War. The Lost Cause movement was an organized effort to preserve the memory of the Confederacy. Historians have examined its political, literary, and social aspects, but Wilson uses the concepts of anthropology, sociology, and historiography to unveil the Lost Cause as an authentic expression of religion. The Lost Cause was celebrated and perpetuated with its own rituals, mythology, and theology; as key celebrants of the religion of the Lost Cause, Southern ministers forged it into a religious movement closely related to their own churches. In examining the role of civil religion in the cult of the military, in the New South ideology, and in the spirit of the Lost Cause colleges, as well as in other aspects, Wilson demonstrates effectively how the religion of the Lost Cause became the institutional embodiment of the South’s tragic experience.

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History PDF Author: Gary W. Gallagher
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253109027
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
A “well-reasoned and timely” (Booklist) essay collection interrogates the Lost Cause myth in Civil War historiography. Was the Confederacy doomed from the start in its struggle against the superior might of the Union? Did its forces fight heroically against all odds for the cause of states’ rights? In reality, these suggestions are an elaborate and intentional effort on the part of Southerners to rationalize the secession and the war itself. Unfortunately, skillful propagandists have been so successful in promoting this romanticized view that the Lost Cause has assumed a life of its own. Misrepresenting the war’s true origins and its actual course, the myth of the Lost Cause distorts our national memory. In The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, nine historians describe and analyze the Lost Cause, identifying ways in which it falsifies history—creating a volume that makes a significant contribution to Civil War historiography. “The Lost Cause . . . is a tangible and influential phenomenon in American culture and this book provides an excellent source for anyone seeking to explore its various dimensions.” —Southern Historian

God's Lost Cause

God's Lost Cause PDF Author: Jean Russell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description


Baptized in Blood

Baptized in Blood PDF Author: Charles Reagan Wilson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340723
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. Out of defeat emerged a civil religion that embodied the Lost Cause. As Charles Reagan Wilson writes in his new preface, "The Lost Cause version of the regional civil religion was a powerful expression, and recent scholarship affirms its continuing power in the minds of many white southerners."

Pulpits of the Lost Cause

Pulpits of the Lost Cause PDF Author: Steve Longenecker
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817321497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Compares the faith and politics of former Confederate chaplains during the Reconstruction period, and argues for some counterintuitive understandings of their beliefs and practices in the post-war period

The Myth of the Lost Cause

The Myth of the Lost Cause PDF Author: Edward H. Bonekemper
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1621574733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
History isn't always written by the winners... Twenty-first-century controversies over Confederate monuments attest to the enduring significance of our nineteenth-century Civil War. As Lincoln knew, the meaning of America itself depends on how we understand that fratricidal struggle. As soon as the Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms at Appomattox, a group of Confederate officers took up their pens to refight the war for the history books. They composed a new narrative—the Myth of the Lost Cause—seeking to ennoble the sacrifice and defeat of the South, which popular historians in the twentieth century would perpetuate. Unfortunately, that myth would distort the historical imagination of Americans, north and south, for 150 years. In this balanced and compelling correction of the historical record, Edward Bonekemper helps us understand the Myth of the Lost Cause and its effect on the social and political controversies that are still important to all Americans.

Religion and the American Civil War

Religion and the American Civil War PDF Author: Randall M. Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198028342
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
The sixteen essays in this volume, all previously unpublished, address the little considered question of the role played by religion in the American Civil War. The authors show that religion, understood in its broadest context as a culture and community of faith, was found wherever the war was found. Comprising essays by such scholars as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Drew Gilpin Faust, Mark Noll, Reid Mitchell, Harry Stout, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and featuring an afterword by James McPherson, this collection marks the first step towards uncovering this crucial yet neglected aspect of American history.

Vale of Tears

Vale of Tears PDF Author: Edward J. Blum
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780865549623
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction offers a window into the exciting work being done by historians, social scientists, and scholars of religious studies on the epoch of Reconstruction. A time of both peril and promise, Reconstruction in America became a cauldron of transformation and change. This collection argues that religion provided the idiom and symbol, as often the very substance, of those changes. The authors of this collection examine how African Americans and white Southerners, New England Abolitionists and former Confederate soldiers, Catholics and Protestants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line brought their sense of the sacred into collaboration and conflict. Together, these essays mark an important new departure in a still-contested period of American history. Interdisciplinary in scope and content, it promises to challenge many of the traditional parameters of Reconstruction historiography. The range of contributors to the project, including Gaines Foster and Paul Harvey, will draw a great deal of attention from Southern historians, literary scholars, and scholars of American religion.

A Stone of Hope

A Stone of Hope PDF Author: David L. Chappell
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807895571
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The civil rights movement was arguably the most successful social movement in American history. In a provocative new assessment of its success, David Chappell argues that the story of civil rights is not a story of the ultimate triumph of liberal ideas after decades of gradual progress. Rather, it is a story of the power of religious tradition. Chappell reconsiders the intellectual roots of civil rights reform, showing how northern liberals' faith in the power of human reason to overcome prejudice was at odds with the movement's goal of immediate change. Even when liberals sincerely wanted change, they recognized that they could not necessarily inspire others to unite and fight for it. But the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament--sometimes translated into secular language--drove African American activists to unprecedented solidarity and self-sacrifice. Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, James Lawson, Modjeska Simkins, and other black leaders believed, as the Hebrew prophets believed, that they had to stand apart from society and instigate dramatic changes to force an unwilling world to abandon its sinful ways. Their impassioned campaign to stamp out "the sin of segregation" brought the vitality of a religious revival to their cause. Meanwhile, segregationists found little support within their white southern religious denominations. Although segregationists outvoted and outgunned black integrationists, the segregationists lost, Chappell concludes, largely because they did not have a religious commitment to their cause.