Compare & Contrast. Approaches used by the three Historians

Comparing and Contrasting the Approaches used by three Historians to Understanding how Americans Remember their Past
Introduction
In their texts, Clark, Gannon and Blight have used diverse approaches to understand the way Americans recall their past. The books written by these three historians are explored. They are compared and contrasted for the purpose of determining the approach that each historian has utilized to understand how Americans remember their past. The exploration of the topic is significant as it would reveal the areas or subject matters in America’s past, such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, Emancipation, and Integration of Black and White Civil War veterans, that each historian considers important to remembering the country’s past. Thesis statement: in their books, each of the three historians has used a different approach to understand how Americans remember their past, each emphasizing different topics and issues. For example, Kathleen Clark has focused on African American efforts of interpreting the historical memory of the Civil War and the Reconstruction, and she emphasizes African American commemorative traditions in the Southern United States. The approach used by Barbara Gannon entails showing the extent of African American integration and participation in the Grand Army of the Republic. Unlike the other historians, she emphasizes the issue of racial integration of the Grand Army of the Republic posts. The approach used by Blight entails exploring the dangerous path of remembering and forgetting. Unlike the other two authors, Blight emphasizes various issues such as the changing meanings of sacrifice and death, soldiers’ reminiscences of the fighting, Reconstruction, the ritual of Memorial Day, and the notion of the Lost Cause.
The three historians are Kathleen Ann Clark who is the author of Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Popular Culture in the South, Barbara Gannon who wrote The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic, and David Blight who authored Race and Reunion. Kathleen Clark in Defining Moments explores the commemorative traditions of Blacks in Southern United States, where various occasions like the 4th of July and the Emancipation Day celebrations provided opportunities for Blacks to avow their own understandings of Emancipation, Civil War, and slavery. Barbara Gannon in The Won Cause explains that even though African American veterans of the Civil War still suffered racism, they were still honored by the Grand Army of the Republic as demonstrated by integrated posts. The book also reveals how African American veterans were accepted and embraced by their white counterparts. David Blight in Race and Reunion looks into the dangerous path of recalling and forgetting, and divulges its catastrophic cost to race relations in the United States as well as to the nation’s national reunion. In this book, the author provides a history of how the unity of White America was purchased by means of the growing segregation of white and black memory of the Civil War. The contents of the three books are similar since they all focus on people’s memory and understanding of the Civil War and the period immediately after this war.
Approaches used by the three Historians
In comprehending how Americans recall their past, the approach that Blight has used in his text Race and Reunion entails looking into the perilous path of remembering, forgetting, and revealing its disastrous cost to race relations in the United States and also to the country’s national reunion. Confronted with a torn country and a devastated landscape, the South and the North in the year 1865 started a painful and slow reconciliation process. The decades that followed saw the triumph of a culture of reunion that downplayed separate division and emphasized the heroics of a war between soldiers of the Gray and the Blue (Blight 26). Virtually lost in national culture included the following: the moral crusades over slavery that started the Civil War itself, the involvement of Blacks in this war, as well as the promise of emancipation which came out of the war.
In his text, Blight gives a historical account of how the unity of White America was purchased using the growing segregation of White and African American memory of the war. He explores the changing meanings of sacrifice and death, soldiers’ reminiscences of the fighting, Reconstruction, the ritual of Memorial Day, the notion of the Lost Cause, and the romanticized South of literature. These are some of the important areas covered in the book Race and Reunion. Other major topics in the text are (Black Memory and Progress of the Race, Soldiers’ Faith, Fifty Years of Freedom and Reunion, the Lost Cause and Causes Not Lost, Reconstruction and Reconciliation, and the Dead and the Living).
By exploring these topics, Blight (54) resurrects many Black voices and memories of the Civil War as well as the efforts of preserving the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture that is built upon its denial. The author’s comprehensive narrative of realism and romance, tragedy and triumph is a convincing story of the politics of memory, of how a country healed from war devoid of justice. It is worth mentioning that the problems of the reunion and race were locked in mutual dependence by the early 20th century, a painful legacy that is still haunting the country in the present day.
Unlike Barbara Gannon in The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic and Kathleen Ann Clark in Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Popular Culture in the South, David W. Blight in his text explains in detail how the overpowered Confederacy recaptured in public memory most of what it had lost in the Civil War. Therefore, by the war’s 50th anniversary, it became a notable assumption that the battle had not been a dispute over the future of slavery in the United States. Instead, the Civil War had been a fight over federal power and tariffs, over the rights of the States and opposing ways of construing the United States Constitution, over almost anything except African Americans and their right to freedom (Blight 59).
In The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic, the approach that Gannon uses to unde...