Glory, Glory : Hollywood’s Consensus Memory of the American Civil War

Abstract

In literal terms, no one alive in the twenty-first century remembers the American Civil War. William Marvel’s 1991 article in Blue and Gray dated the death of the last Civil War veteran, a Union man, at 1956. ¹ A child born on the day of the Confederate surrender would have had to have lived to just shy of 135 years to have seen in the present century. This war has, however, remained part of a national and international memory despite there being no living person today able to say “I was there.” What we “remember,” then, is perhaps more accurately described as what we perceive or believe about the Civil War, principally composed of a plethora of stories, images, and icons, factual and fictional, from a relatively finite range of public and pub­lished forms, among these being school textbooks, memorial and heritage sites, memoirs, academic publishing, television documentaries, and narrative cinema. ²