Civil War David Blight Summary

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David Blight is a very capable historian and writer. He has been teaching history at Yale University since 2003 and before that he taught at Amherst college for thirteen years. He has his roots in deep in the study of slavery and abolition at Yale as the Direct of a particular study called the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He has many different awards and accreditations for his work as a historian in many different fields of history and is a member of the Society of American Historians. Blight has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Blight’s experience and education as well as the faith that has been bestowed upon him by his colleagues can be viewed in his accomplishments like being presented …show more content…
He wanted to prove that a lot of the memories that are dominant about the civil war came from the south and how people felt about the civil war was also a product of southern literature. This book is basically a fifty-year analysis of how the Civil War has been historically remembered. Blight uses evidence from spokespersons to show how extremely the views of the Civil War from blacks and whites have changed overtime. He also brings about three different ways to think about the meaning of the war and that was either as an emancipationist, as a white supremist, or as a reconciliationist. The emancipationists believed that the war would bring about freedom, equality, and reawakening of the land while reconciliationists believed that they could live with their differences. The white supremists believed in segregation, in some aspects violence and instilling terror in the black communities and then sometimes the linked together with the Reconciliationists. The white supremists are the ones who put the wedge in society and insisted on a country that was free of slaves yet segregated by …show more content…
Blight states that when the war was over the emancipationist’s ended up with positive effects in applying essential Reconstruction, but after all of that ended African Americans and white southerners were still left in a situation that they didn’t really know how to deal with. The former slaves were now left to figure out their lives while their former masters were forced to let them walk away. The southerners and northerners were still having problems uniting after the war and that is where the reconciliationist visions came into effect and gave the idea that the Civil War was a caused by issues that were advanced by issues like the rights of the states. This view was popular and eventually merged with the views of white supremists but didn’t do anything for the good or progress of African American welfare. Blight explains that race along with the actual points of the Civil War were buried in the memories of emancipationists which twisted and changed over time. He views the accounts of many different abolitionists and African Americans as they battled for their place in the memories of Americans and the civil war. He reviews the Lost Cause sentiments and how
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