The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader by James W. Loewen

As they quite correctly note, contemporary history textbooks have moved away from including direct quotations and documentary evidence in favor of often simplified and watered down summaries of key events from the American past.

The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader begins with a wonderful introduction to the source material in the book and a useful discussion of what drew the editors to engage in such a project. The book provides teachers and researchers alike with an invaluable archive of speeches, images, political papers, and memoirs that graphically reveal what the Confederacy and its post-war nostalgists actually believed about slavery, secession, race relations, and the whitewashing of the southern past. Loewen and Sebesta’s exceptional new text The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader is the first collection of primary sources focused exclusively on such documents, as the authors note, that have somehow remained hidden “in plain sight” since the end of the Civil War. For those of us that study and teach issues of Civil War memory, one of our great frustrations has been the lack of easily attainable primary source material to thoroughly discredit and dismantle the mythological claims of Confederate and neo-Confederate revisionists. The great mnemonic power of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy has been in its ability to uphold almost all of the original tenets of its long-standing mythologies (the war was not about slavery, most slaveholders were benevolent, the Confederacy fought for states’ rights, Confederate heroes are above reproach, etc.) of the Civil War and the Confederacy throughout the last 150 years.

The University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The Great Truth about the Lost Cause edited by James Loewen and Edward Sebesta.

The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader by James W. Loewen