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Article: Still Fighting the Civil War: the American South and Southern History.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The Journal of Southern History
- Article date:
- November 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Southern Historical Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By David Goldfield. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Pp. [xvi], 354. $34.95, ISBN 0-8071-2758-2.)
The place of the Civil War in American history was summed up, and to an extent defined, by Robert Penn Warren in his centennial survey of that conflict. It was, he wrote, "history lived in the national imagination," but there was a distinctly sectional division within that imagination. The war, as Warren memorably put it, gave the North the "Treasury of Virtue," the South the "Great Alibi." "By the Great Alibi," the southerner "turns defeat into victory, defects into virtues" (Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War [New York, 1961], pp. 4, 54, 56). ...