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Article: Disaffection, persistence, and nation: some directions in recent scholarship on the confederacy.(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Civil War History
- Article date:
- September 1, 2009
- Author:
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Thirty years have passed since Emory M. Thomas's The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 appeared on the historiographical landscape. Some of its themes had been present in his earlier The Confederacy as Revolutionary Experience, and together the two books heralded the emergence of a major figure in the field. (1) Factors weakening the Confederacy loomed larger than evidence of Rebel persistence or strength in the scholarly literature at that time, but Thomas took seriously the idea of national sentiment in the seceding states. When defeat apparently stalked the slaveholding republic in the spring of 1862 and "their national experiment seemed almost a failure, Confederate ...