When Stephen Crane published his bestselling The Red Badge of Courage in 1895, numerous Civil War veterans commented that he was the fi rst author who had captured their reality of war; many assumed that Crane must be a fellow veteran. But Crane, of course, was no Civil War soldier: born in 1871, six years after the confl ict ended, he gleaned much of his detailed historical knowledge of the war from perusing old issues of the famous Century Magazine "Battles and Leaders" series.
Looking back, Crane reconstructed the war through memory and imagination; but for readers in the twentieth century his novel was itself a fresh experience of the war, one that would inform their own memories -not to mention continue today to infl uence our understandings of the Civil War. Like Crane's Red Badge of Courage, Margaret Mitchell's bestselling Gone with the Wind (1936) was not just a work of original imagination; among other infl uences on Mitchell's understanding of the war was D. W. Griffi th's landmark fi lm, Birth of a Nation (1915), which had been strongly infl uenced by Thomas Dixon's The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). These works, which have had a powerful, continuing impact on American culture, are also a reminder of the densely accreted, geological nature of memory in general -and certainly of memories of the Civil War.
If one way to understand the impact of the Civil War in American culture is to drill downward through layers of memory, remaining sensitive to the complexities of proximity and infl uence along the way, another method is to stop at any one point in time and take stock of the surrounding landscape of Civil War remembrance. As Stuart McConnell usefully reminds us, the "geography of memory" is an "uneven physical, cultural, and political space" in which some forms of memory are "more available to some social groups than to others" (Fahs & Waugh 2004: 259). Questions of political and social power determine who gets to claim the memory of the Civil War at any given moment, especially as a means of affi rming group identity or membership in the nation.
These questions of power are at the heart of the new Civil War cultural history. Examining both cultural artifacts (such as photographs, monuments, and literature) and the cultural processes by which these artifacts have been created and remembered, recent scholars have insisted that we can fully understand the Civil War only if we study its cultural history in addition to military, political, and social history. At issue,