| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

William A. Blair. Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914. (Civil War America.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 250. $34.95.
Even before the recent outpouring of scholarship on the construction of memory, historians of the American South have since the 1930s sought to understand how this region commemorated the Civil War. Until recently, most historians had studied how white southerners remembered the "Lost Cause." One of the strengths of William A. Blair's book is his effort to document how both white and black southerners sought to remember this conflict. Although interested in questions of memory, Blair's approach is not cultural; rather he seeks to understand the "political role of commemorations" (p. 4). In his case study focusing on Virginia, with additional evidence drawn from Louisiana and South Carolina, Blair shows how white and black political leaders sought to use rituals of mourning and commemoration to advance their respective political agendas. Blair focuses on two holidays—Memorial Day and Emancipation Day—to ground his study.	1
In contrast to earlier interpretations of the origins of Confederate Memorial Day, Blair stresses how white southerners initially used the Confederate war dead as symbols of resistance to federal domination under Reconstruction. Cemeteries served as convenient places of protest in a period when federal authorities often banned former Confederates from marching on the street in their grey uniforms or holding other commemorative activities. Blair sees a subversive quality in the efforts of the southern Ladies Memorial Associations to repatriate the Confederate war dead from northern gravesites and rebury them in cemeteries such as Hollywood in Richmond.	. . .

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