Yale historian David W. Blight: Civil War memory shifted from emancipation to reunion

David W. Blight, professor of history at Yale University, told a University of Montana audience that U.S. public memory of the Civil War shifted over the late 19th and early 20th centuries from an emphasis on emancipation and Reconstruction to a reconciliationist narrative that minimized slavery as the war’s cause.

Blight outlined three dominant strains of Civil War memory he identified in his research: "reconciliationist memory," which elevated shared soldierly sacrifice; "white supremacist memory," which took forms including terror and later Jim Crow ideology; and "emancipationist memory," rooted in African American political memory and the politics of Reconstruction. "We tend to know those collective memories when we meet them," Blight said, arguing that ritual,…