| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Goldfield. Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 354. $34.95.
This is not exactly a scholarly book. David Goldfield wishes not to provide a "comprehensive history" of "why southerners have remembered the Civil War and Reconstruction as they have, and how these perspectives shaped an American region" but rather "to share a series of thoughts ... that will help newcomers and long-time residents understand the South and, hopefully, each other" (p. 14). He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, a place of many immigrants, so the impulse to write "primarily for my neighbors, not my colleagues" is understandable and even admirable, but it makes any scholarly reviewer (not his neighbor) into a bystander with little at stake.	1
Goldfield's sermon is a liberal one. He sees the post-Civil War South as evolving into "a closed, exclusive, and hierarchical society" that came in time to be challenged from within and without by "an open, diverse, and fluid civilization" (p. 14). He thinks this struggle is still being enacted, that the Civil War remains alive in memory and society. Race and religion mostly explain this persistence, since racism created barriers that fundamentalism sanctified. This struggle is incomplete and still urgent, despite the South's recent prosperity. Fundamentalism persists and racial reconciliation (though advanced immeasurably by the standards of 1950) is stalled. The point of the sermon is to persuade neighbors to transcend the traditional memories and try again, since Goldfield is convinced that the fate of the South is somehow fundamental to the American future. "What southern society will become in this new century, especially given the growing economic and political importance of the region, and what America will become as well, will depend largely on how southerners reconstruct their past" (p. 318).	. . .

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