The romance of reunion : northerners and the South, 1865-1900
The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nina Silber documents the transformation from hostile sectionalism to sentimental reunion rhetoric. Northern culture created a notion of reconciliation that romanticized and feminized southern society. In tourist accounts, novels, minstrel shows, and popular magazines, northerners contributed to a mythic and nostalgic picture of the South that served to counter their anxieties regarding the breakdown of class and gender roles in Gilded Age America. Indeed, for many Yankees, the ultimate symbol of the reunion process, and one that served to reinforce Victorian values as well as northern hegemony, was the marriage of a northern man and a southern woman. Southern men also were represented as affirming traditional gender roles. As northern men wrestled with their nation's increasingly global and aggressive foreign policy, the military virtues extolled in Confederate legend became more admired than reviled. By the 1890s, concludes Silber, northern whites had accepted not only a newly resplendent image of Dixie but also a sentimentalized view of postwar reunion. --From publisher's description
Print Book, English, ©1993
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, ©1993
History
xii, 257 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
9780807821169, 9780807864487, 9780807846858, 0807821160, 080786448X, 0807846856
27725800
Intemperate men, spiteful women, and Jefferson Davis: Northern views of the defeated South
Reconstruction of the heart: reunion and sentimentality during Southern Reconstruction
Sick Yankees in paradise: Northern tourism in the Reconstructed South
The culture of conciliation: a moral alternative in the Gilded Age
Minstrels and mountaineers: the whitewashed road to reunion
New patriotism and new men in the new South