Burying the Dead But Not the Past - (Civil War America) by Caroline E Janney (Paperback)

About the Book

Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause

Book Synopsis

Immediately after the Civil War, white women across the South organized to retrieve the remains of Confederate soldiers. In Virginia alone, these Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) relocated and reinterred the remains of more than 72,000 soldiers. Challenging the notion that southern white women were peripheral to the Lost Cause movement until the 1890s, Caroline Janney restores these women as the earliest creators and purveyors of Confederate tradition. Long before national groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were established, Janney shows, local LMAs were earning sympathy for defeated Confederates. Her exploration introduces new ways in which gender played a vital role in shaping the politics, culture, and society of the late nineteenth-century South.

Review Quotes

"[An] impressive book. . . . Highly recommended." -- CHOICE

"[This] excellent study speaks to a significant gap in the literature of southern cultural memory, gender, and Reconstruction. Not only is it a must-read for anyone working in those areas, but it is a key contribution to the study of women and gender in this period." -- Journal of American History

"An elegant, informative study that restores these forgotten women to postwar southern history and successfully challenges important scholarly arguments." -- The Alabama Review

"Janney has succeeded in crafting a thoughtful study that illuminates a little known area of the formation of the Lost Cause ideology." -- South Carolina Historical Magazine

"Janney's fine monograph is grounded in an impressive body of archival material supported by a very strong command of a wide array of secondary source literature." -- Southern Historian

"Janney's thoughtful study helps the Ladies to claim their rightful place in the history of Confederate memory making. Her lively stories of their hard-fought campaigns to build some of the most notable monuments of the state likewise make this an entertaining and valuable addition to the history of southern women's activism after the war." -- Virginia Magazine

"Sheds light on a previously obscure part of southern women's history. . . . Convincingly demonstrates that women continued to participate in a civic role after the fall of the Confederacy." -- Virginia Quarterly Review

"This clearly written and well-researched book definitely deepens our understanding of the earliest roots of Confederate memorialization and the Lost Cause." -- Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

"This excellent and well-written book illuminates the work of an important group in the South's Lost Cause movement." -- American Historical Review

A well-documented study of this unique women's movement after the Civil War. Any serious student of the Civil War or Reconstruction should be aware of the powerful arguments extended by Janney." -- On Point