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Not Even Past

The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War

Cody Marrs author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Johns Hopkins University Press

Published:19th May '20

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Not Even Past cover

How the Civil War endures in American life through literature and culture.

Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award's Montaigne Medal

The American Civil War lives on in our collective imagination like few other events. The story of the war has been retold in countless films, novels, poems, memoirs, plays, sculptures, and monuments. Often remembered as an emancipatory struggle, as an attempt to destroy slavery in America now and forever, it is also memorialized as a fight for Southern independence; as a fratricide that divided the national family; and as a dark, cruel conflict defined by its brutality. What do these stories, myths, and rumors have in common, and what do they teach us about modern America?

In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs reveals how these narratives evolved over time and why they acquired such lasting power. Marrs addresses an eclectic range of texts, traditions, and creators, from Walt Whitman, Abram Ryan, and Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Mitchell, D. W. Griffith, and W. E. B. Du Bois. He also identifies several basic plots about the Civil War that anchor public memory and continually compete for cultural primacy. In other words, from the perspective of American cultural memory, there is no single Civil War.

Whether they fill us with elation or terror; whether they side with the North or the South; whether they come from the 1860s, the 1960s, or today, these stories all make one thing vividly clear: the Civil War is an ongoing conflict, persisting not merely as a cultural touchstone but as an unresolved struggle through which Americans inevitably define themselves. A timely, evocative, and beautifully written book, Not Even Past is essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil War and its role in American history.

Marrs examines the shifting landscape of Civil War perspectives throughout history using public memory and writing from creators such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Walt Whitman, and Margaret Mitchell. He argues that this continual retelling and reinterpretation reveal the Civil War as an ongoing struggle never far from American consciousness and identity.
—Chelsea Risley, Southern Review of Books
Marrs weaves a complex history to capture the essence of the literature and art surrounding the Civil War, resulting in a valuable work beneficial to a variety of collections.
Library Journal
Not Even Past is a trenchant, wide-ranging survey of the history that binds us a nation while, at the same time, drives us apart. Because it still needs proving now and again, Marrs' book proves that the American Civil War is with us today as much as it was when it began a century and a half ago.
—Lance Weller, New York Journal of Books
Not Even Past is an impressive feat that straddles the line between intense academic history and popular history. The world needs more such books.
—Daniel Sunshine, Civil War Book Review
The reader is left with a sense of an America still divided, and, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, the Civil War as "...a social revolution... never allowed to complete itself."
Eric Hoffer Award Committee
Cody Marrs serves up a feast of Civil War stories in his timely, compact, and entertaining new analysis, Not Even the Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War.
—LeAnna Keith, The Journal of Southern History
Cody Marr's impressive, wide-ranging new book...
—Michel LeMahieu, Clemson University, American Literary History

  • Winner of Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award for Nonfiction in the Culture Category 2020 (United States)

ISBN: 9781421436654

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm

Weight: 408g

240 pages