The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History

Was the Confederacy doomed from the start in its struggle against the superior might of the Union? Did its forces fight heroically against all odds for the cause of states’ rights? In reality, these suggestions are an elaborate and intentional effort on the part of Southerners to rationalize the secession and the war itself. Unfortunately, skillful propagandists have been so successful in promoting this romanticized view that the Lost Cause has assumed a life of its own. Misrepresenting the war’s true origins and its actual course, the myth of the Lost Cause distorts our national memory. In The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, nine historians describe and analyze the Lost Cause, identifying ways in which it falsifies history―creating a volume that makes a significant contribution to Civil War historiography.

• The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won
• Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920
• Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)
• The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" about the "Lost Cause"
• Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
• Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (New Perspectives on the History of the South)
• The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861
• The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy
• Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913
• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era