The history of the American Civil War’s public memory is a vast one, and Blight is selective in his focus. He emphasizes the memories of Civil War veterans, African American memory, Reconstruction political discourse and debate, nostalgic literature, and the birth of Memorial Day. He includes white and Black voices and the memories of Northerners and Southerners so that the book highlights conflicting narratives and the different ways that various groups remembered the Civil War.

Three versions of the war’s memory collided in the 50 years after the war. The first version is the “reconciliationist view” that took shape shortly after the war’s end, as the country recovered from mass death and destruction. Next is the white supremacist version, which often worked in tandem with the reconciliationists. Finally, Blight identifies the “emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ complex remembrance of their own freedom, in the politics of radical Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war as the invention of the republic and the liberation of blacks [sic] to citizenship and Constitutional equality” (2).

The first two visions overwhelmed the third, as whites privileged reconciliation over justice for millions of emancipated Black men and women.