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Gone With the Wind?
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16523 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1989 |
5,566 Words |
| Author
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Clyde Wilson
Clyde Wilson is a professor of history at the University of
South Carolina and the author or editor of over thirty books
on American history and literature. |
OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL
Allan Gurganus
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989
718 pp., $21.95
Despite all that has happened since, the Civil War is still the central episode of American history. More men and resources were mobilized for that struggle and the casualties were greater, compared to the population at the time, than in any other war in American history, including World Wars I and II. And the Civil War still contains the fundamental knot of debate (and that in no simple way) on many of the major issues with which the American republic has struggled--modernization versus tradition, the meaning of the Constitution, consolidation of power versus its dispersal, ideals versus realities, and the position of minorities in American society.
It is not surprising that the war has generated a huge literature. It is said that more books have been written about the American Civil War than any other subject except for the Christian religion. And this refers just to the struggle of 1861-1865 and its immediate causes and aftermath. If we expand the category to include the Old South, slavery, and Reconstruction, the volume of words expands to staggering proportions.
And I am referring here only to nonfiction. Another vast subject is opened up when we consider the Civil War as stimulus and subject matter for creative literature, both popular and serious. Consider that the all-time best-seller of the earlier nineteenth century was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. A major
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