Creating a Confederate Kentucky - (Civil War America) by Anne E Marshall (Paperback)

About the Book

Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State

Book Synopsis

In Creating a Confederate Kentucky, Anne E. Marshall traces the development of a Confederate identity in Kentucky between 1865 and 1925, belying the fact that Kentucky never left the Union. After the Civil War, the people of Kentucky appeared to forget their Union loyalties and embraced the Democratic politics, racial violence, and Jim Crow laws associated with former Confederate states. Marshall looks beyond postwar political and economic factors to the longer-term commemorations of the Civil War by which Kentuckians fixed the state's remembrance of the conflict for the following sixty years.

Review Quotes

"A must read for all Civil War historians." -- Journal of NC Association of Historians

"An excellent book: tightly argued, richly detailed, and elegantly written. It is a model of what a state study can do, showing the importance of not just race, but also place, to the story of the Lost Cause." -- Civil War Monitor

"An intelligent narrative. . . . The author writes well and is easy to read. . . . A valuable and serious history of the development of Confederate memory in Kentucky and in America. . . . An excellent book for any student of Reconstruction, the process of reconciliation or the years after the Civil War." -- TOCWOC: A Civil War Blog

"An interesting, informative book. It helps clarify the experiences of many of us who grew up in Kentucky. . . . The book has set a new standard." -- The Kentucky Civil War Bugle

"Anne Marshall's Creating a Confederate Kentucky alters the entire field of Civil War memory study....[It] is a masterful work of scholarship. Its prose is lucid; its research is thorough; and its interpretative power is truly ground-breaking." -- Civil War Book Review

"By enriching our understanding of the ways Confederate Kentuckians, white Unionists, and African Americans interpreted the state's participation in the Civil War, Marshall also sheds significant light on the processes through which competing interests claim ownership of history." -- The Journal of American History

"Examines all sides of Kentucky's Union-Confederate postwar dialogue. . . . [A] thoughtful, carefully researched and plausibly presented historical study, illustrated with a handful of vintage black-and-white photographs. Highly recommended." -- Midwest Book Review

"Marshall has crafted an easily read, easily comprehensible scholarly volume. Recommended. All levels/libraries." -- CHOICE

"Marshall has illuminated an important and understudied aspect of how a border region simultaneously departed from and reflected broader patterns of memory. Marshall's excellent study will refine our understanding of how contested and unpredictable memory was and continues to be." -- The American Historical Review

"Rather than focusing exclusively on postwar political and economic factors, Creating a Confederate Kentucky looks over the longer term at Kentuckians' activities . . . by which they commemorated the Civil War and fixed the state's remembrance of it for sixty years following the conflict. . . . Will be a nice addition to your Confederate/Kentucky library shelf. . . . Excellent." -- Lone Star Book Review