baptized in blood the religion of the lost cause

This insight is not entirely new, but Goldfield argues and explains it particularly well here.Ĭhapters 4, 5, and 6 are about women in the South. Goldfield argues effectively that once southern history got tangled up with religion, changing one's views about history involved also changing one's views about religion. The broad sweep of chapter 2, moving from the original antislavery stance of evangelical denominations in the South through their support for slavery to their interpretation of the Civil War as a 'blessed defeat' all the way to the role of the white and black church in the modern civil rights movement, provides a context for Goldfield's more detailed discussion in chapter 3 of how religion and historical orthodoxy worked hand-in-hand. This approach follows one of the landmark works in the study of the Lost Cause, Charles Reagan Wilson's 1980 Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. In the second half of this chapter and in chapters 2 and 3, Goldfield explains the stranglehold that the Lost Cause quickly gained on white southern minds in terms of religion and orthodoxy. The first chapter of Still Fighting the Civil War lays out briefly the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the rise of the Lost Cause interpretation of those events. Goldfield's summaries do an admirable job of boiling down complex works to their essence and retelling them in a very readable style without obscuring the arguments at stake. He moves easily from summaries of the secondary literature on a variety of topics and expository paragraphs explaining how these works fit into his framework of southern history. history textbook, Goldfield is well prepared for the task. To address this question, Goldfield leads the reader through a good synthesis of much of the best recent work on the history of the South from 1865 to the immediate past. The title of David Goldfield's latest book leaves little question as to its subject: Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History takes off from the perennial question of why southerners care so much about history-at least that portion between 18-and how that has affected them and their region.

Baker (Department of History, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History.īaton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

Baptized in blood the religion of the lost cause