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Reviews
| Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War, by Gary W. Gallagher. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 288 pages. $28, cloth.
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| The Civil War, more than any other period of American history, absorbs popular interest. While this popular interest has produced a vast library of published books, most Americans understand the war through the witness of popular culture, especially films and documentaries, and to a lesser extent popular art. Gary W. Gallagher's Cause Won, Lost, and Forgotten respectfully examines these popular knowledge-making activities while critiquing them from the perspective of academic knowledge about the war. |
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Gallagher identifies four themes the public uses to interpret the war: the Lost Cause (noble confederates), the Union Cause (preservation of the union), the Emancipation Cause (freedom for slaves), and the Reconciliation Cause (both sides fighting for American values, ignoring the role of African-Americans). Although one theme is usually primary, Gallagher argues that these themes combine and recombine to varying degrees. Within the last few decades, the Lost Cause narrative of older films has been largely supplanted as the dominant narrative of Hollywood productions by the Reconciliation Cause (albeit with a post-Vietnam portrayal of a negative Union Army). |
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The older films that Gallagher briefly surveys in the early chapter have received longer treatment in works such as Bruce Chadwick's The Reel Civil War. Gallagher's contribution, therefore, is to read fairly recent films and then place them in the context of both older films and the extensive market for Civil War painting, prints, and sculpture. Throughout the narrative, Gallagher is attentive to the subtle ways that popular art works within and among the four traditions. Gallagher's interviews with artists, reading of promotional literature, and comparison of artistic subjects with movie themes and the historical record allow him to see the ways in which documentaries and films influence the representation of the war across forms. Gallagher argues persuasively that Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War exercises an outsized influence, drawing undue attention to particular battles and serving as the representation of academic thinking, even when actual academic thinking is more complex. In addition, popular artists' representations of Civil War figures often resemble the actors portraying them in Hollywood productions more than their historical antecedents. Throughout his account, Gallagher carefully acknowledges that Hollywood's dramatic purposes and the academy's nuanced argument often work at cross-purposes. His intention is to show the ways that Hollywood's drama influences popular historical understanding, not to ask the impossible of the film industry. |
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Those who teach the Civil War—either in specialized classes or surveys—will find this book an excellent codification of the knowledge students bring to the classroom. Knowing what conceptions and misconceptions students already possess helps teachers anticipate strengths and weaknesses. Gallagher's respectful treatment of each tradition and his insistence that these traditions each present an unbalanced version of history serves as a model for teachers in how to bring students toward a more subtle understanding of the war, one based in the historical record rather than popular dramatic interest. Gallagher's book will be a lively read for courses in the history of popular culture, film, or war and society. The book's style is careful and scholarly without any hint of leaden prose. This means that by some measures it may not fully satisfy academic readers: for instance, the book would have been stronger if it had engaged the literature on the nature of popular memory and the role of media in its construction. The book makes a solid contribution to this literature, perhaps best exemplified by works such as Marita Sturken's Tangled Memories or Alison Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory, neither of which the author engages. But this quibble does not detract from my recommendation of the book as important reading for all teachers of American history and useful in their classrooms. |
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| Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. |
Michael Coventry |
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