Lawrence-Sanders, Ashleigh. Confronting the rebel yell: how African Americans created and contested Civil War memory, 1865-1965. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-ycqj-x939
DescriptionConfronting the Rebel Yell: How African Americans Created and Contested Civil War Memory, 1865-1965 centers Black American memory creation and counter-memory of the Civil War through the mid-20th century. This dissertation focuses on Black perspectives and utilizes African American histories, newspapers, popular culture and activism to demonstrate the reach and importance of Black Civil War memory. African American Civil War memory has undergirded most of African American social movements since Emancipation. In fact, African American Civil War memory increased in importance in the decades after the end of the war, rather than declined. African American Civil War memory was not monolithic and has been used, disputed, and leveraged by a diverse group of African Americans throughout the century after the war’s end. While confrontation with white Southern nostalgia manifested through the Lost Cause is a large part of the story, this dissertation reveals that African American ideas about the war were often as important internally as a means of crafting a usable past for racial uplift. This dissertation examines the long history of African Americans’ fight to be included in Civil War memory and how African Americans countered the dangerous myths of the Lost Cause while creating their own narratives about the war.