Confederates In The Attic Quotes

There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.

You asked how I'd define prejudice. That's it. Making assumptions about people you've never met.

Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.

When Union litter-bearers climbed out of their trenches, four days after the assault, they found only two men still alive amongst the piles of stinking corpses. One burial party discovered a dead Yankee with a diary in his pocket, the last entry of which read: “June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed.

I've been here in Richmond for six years and I still don't get it. To me, having the principal Richmond monuments dedicated to the Lost Cause is like saying we're dedicated to no hope, no future. It's like having a monument to unrequited love.

Seven severely depressed prisoners were listed as having died of “nostalgia.

Andersonville lay on American soil and saw the death of 13,000 Americans in American custody.

Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.

The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren't national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were precisely the opposite; leaders of a rebellion against the nation - separatists at best, traitors at worst. None of those honored were native Richmonders. And their mission failed. They didn't call it the Lost Cause for nothing. I couldn't think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

The way I see it," King said, "your great-grandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I'm supposed to feel all warm inside about that?

You know what I hate?' she said. 'When people say that history repeats itself. That's the scariest thing I can think of.

A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.

Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I'd met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs.

I asked him if he thought “there” was better than “here.” “Not better,” he said. “I mean, my great-great-grandpap got his leg shot off. But I feel like it was bigger somehow.” Hawkins flipped through pages of Civil War pictures. “At work, I mix dyes and put them in a machine. I’m thirty-six and I’ve spent almost half my life in Dye House No. 1. I make eight dollars sixty-one cents an hour, which is okay, ’cept everyone says the plant will close and go to China.” He put the book back on the shelf. “I just feel like the South has been given a bum deal ever since that War.

I later read a survey about Southerners' knowledge of the War; only half of those aged eighteen to twenty-four could name a single battle, and only one in eight knew if they had a Confederate ancestor. This was a long way from the experience of earlier generations, smothered from birth in the thick gravy of Confederate culture and schooled on textbooks that were little more than Old South propaganda. In this sense, ignorance might prove a blessing. Knowing less about the past, kids seemed less attached to it. Maybe the South would finally exorcise its demons by simply forgetting the history that created them. But Alabaman's seemed to have also let go of the more recent and hopeful history embodied in Martin Luther King's famous speech. "I have a dream," he said, of an Alabama where "black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

They’re pushing the envelope in terms of authenticity,” the Camp Chase Gazette editor, Bill Holschuh, told me when I phoned for his opinion. “About the only thing left is live ammunition and Civil War diseases. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Look at these buttons,” one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. “I soaked them overnight in a saucer filled with urine.” Chemicals in the urine oxidized the brass, giving it the patina of buttons from the 1860s. “My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again.

For Robert Lee Hodge, it was also a way of life. As the Marlon Brando of battlefield bloating, he was often hired for Civil War movies.

Jewish-Southern culture had also bred the ultimate in fusion food: Gershon Weinberg’s pork and ribs barbecue restaurant in Alabama.

Elijah gives

In principle, rememberance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860's. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in s grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.

Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something's wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.

their poster boy was the Scottish clansman played by Mel Gibson in the splatterfest Braveheart. In their view, rationalism and technological efficiency were suspect Yankee traits, derived from a mercantile English empire that had put down the Scots and Irish.

Just before school ended, the high school history teacher, Mr. Owens, invited me to his classroom, where I peered at his photos. One photo showed him on a family canoe trip. He also had photos of the submarine he had served on and mock battles that he had participated in as a Civil War reenactor. “The students like that I was in the navy,” he said. Mr. Owens and I discussed the Tony Horwitz book, Confederates in the Attic, about Civil War reenacting taken to the extreme, and Mr. Owens was quick to say, “I'm not that hard core.

The late Tony Horwitz, the author of the brilliant book Confederates in the Attic, called Lexington “the second city of Confederate remembrance: Medina to Richmond’s Mecca.

But in the intervening decades, something curious had happened, an act of what psychologists today might term "recovered memory." Locals had reclaimed a past of their own , in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates. "History, like nature, knows no jumps." Robert Penn Warren once wrote. "Except the jump backward,

This may sound sexist,' Joslyn said, 'but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it's an action story, they're caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better....

Was there such a thing as politically correct remembrance of the Confederacy? Or was any attempt to honor the Cause inevitably tainted by what Southernerners once delicately referred to as their 'peculiar institution?

We're not migrating people,' she said. 'We live in our old houses, and eat on our old dishes and use our old silverware everyday. We're close to the past and comfortable with it. We've surrounded our lives with the pictures of all our relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things personality beyond just the material they're made of.

We've always lived in the past in Selma, and we still do. But the past has changed on us. It included a lot of stories it didn't used to.

History is lived forward but it is written in retrospect,' the English historian C.V. Wedgwood observed. 'We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

Daijiro said the group was composed of retired fruit and vegetable wholesalers on a week-long tour of America. They were visiting three places only: Niagara Falls, Las Vegas and Atlanta. “We want to see the history and beauty of America,” Daijiro explained.

I couldn’t think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

Southerners are a military people. We were back then, still are today. Every man in here has carried a gun for his country and probably a few of the women, too.

What gets me is the heart of the Jews. They were underdogs, they knew they were going to die but didn’t give up the faith,” she said. “Just like the Confederates.

You know what they call North Carolina,” Ed Curtis added. “ ‘A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.’ ” He smiled. “Of course that’s a conceited thing to say about yourself. But at least we’re humble about how much better we are than anyplace else.

In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago,” he said. “Folks here don’t always see it that way. They think it’s still half-time.

The way I see it,” King said, “your greatgrandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I’m supposed to feel all warm inside about that?

The banner most Americans now called the rebel flag—a diagonal blue cross studded with white stars and laid across a field of red—served only as a combat standard during the War.

The best thing about Southern manners was that they seemed to improve my own, at least temporarily.

Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny.

The South represents the only remaining stumbling block to the imposition of an American police state.” This state, he added, would plunge America into a “New World Order” marked by a “Godless” and “mongrelized” multiculturalism.