Quotes from Elizabeth D. Samet

Our national problem has not been ignoring the Civil War, but turning it into a kind of theme park in which nostalgia and mendacity have eclipsed the raw and unpleasant truth that one army fought, and lost, a battle for the liberty to enslave other human beings, while the other, full of imperfect men fighting for a variety of motives, secured the emancipation of those human beings and thereby preserved a political experiment underwritten by the idea of equality.

James Gould Cozzens used this incident in his 1948 novel Guard of Honor, but he moved it to the South.

The whistle now resides at the Pratt Institute but used to blow the shift changes at Bethlehem Steel;

Yes—what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

The antebellum embrace of Manifest Destiny committed many Americans to an ideal: a country without a past.

late-nineteenth-century recasting of the Civil War's achievement from African American emancipation to white reconciliation

The postwar canonizing of Southern heroes, together with the cultivation of the plantation myth, which conjured an antebellum golden age, effectively destroyed the narrative of emancipation, which had been written in the blood of war