| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Ed. by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton. (New York: New Press, 2006. xvi, 272 pp. $25.95, ISBN 1-56584-960-4.)
In his 1979 speech at Brown University, "Going to the Territory," Ralph Ellison spoke of the segregation of memory in the wake of the Civil War. Whites north and south, seeking reunion, formed an image of the war that blamed radicals on both sides and then blamed blacks for the problems of Reconstruction. The victors—white people—then left the field, making African Americans the scapegoats for the bloody, needless war. Reading the outstanding essays in Slavery and Public History leads one to think that we still have a long way to go to correct that historical memory, though we are moving in the right direction.	1
This set of essays comes at exactly the moment we need them, as there is growing discussion of the memory of slavery and the era of Jim Crow and of what to do about their legacies. The essays are ordered from the macro to the micro. The first three address metaissues: Ira Berlin on the meaning of slavery for the twenty-first century, David W. Blight on the ubiquitous memory of the war (with the confession that "the world is riven with too much memory"), and James Oliver Horton on the national dialogue (p. 25).	. . .

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