Unwinding the Vietnam War: From War into Peace Book

Shelby Foote called the Civil War “The crossroads of our being” as Americans. In A Reusable Past, Jim Cullen writes that “officially, the Civil War ended in 1865, but culturally, it was just beginning.” The war’s meaning was at stake; if history can be said to be written by the victor, outside observers might find it hard to understand that the South lost the war.

“Carl Sandburg is the worst thing to happen to Lincoln since Booth shot him.”—Edmund Wilson

“The South has had its full share of illusions, fantasies, and pretensions, and it has continued to cling to some of them with an astonishing tenacity that defies explanation. But the illusion that ‘history is something unpleasant that happens to other people’ is surely not one of them…”—C. Vann Woodward

…an urge to remember and a simultaneous urge to forget have been irresistible impulses for white Southerners since 1865.

If rock ’n’ roll grew out of Civil War tensions, the fact that it did not emerge until the next century suggests that other factors must also have been at work.