Descriptions, Reviews, etc.
Description:
"Exceptional...This is a much-needed reframing of what catalyzes civil strife." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
What can Americans learn about our divided country today from the Civil War that divided us in the past?
Connor Williams's
The Confederacy Myth answers that question with a blistering historical exposé that reframes our understanding of the Confederacy towards with what it really was - a relatively small insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the nation into its deadliest war.
In his new book, Williams reveals the truth about the Confederacy by unraveling its myths and uncovering its perilous political tactics, irate ideologies, reckless brand of warfare, impotent governance, and enduring commitment to slavery. Most importantly, Williams reminds us why the United States prevailed in the Civil War: five out of six Americans resisted the Confederate insurgency and instead put everything on the line to fight for democracy so that our Republic would have a new birth of freedom.
The Confederacy Myth is at once an eye-opening work of history as well as a timely reminder of our duties as citizens today.
Brief description:
CONNOR WILLIAMS was Lead Historian for the United States Congress' Naming Commission. He has taught for Yale University, Middlebury College, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and has worked as a public historian and consultant on several other major renaming and reconciliation projects.
Review Quotes:
"Exceptional ... There is a blistering urgency in Willliams's narrative, as he repeatedly suggests that such fanatical and fabulously wealthy elites are again posing a grave threat to American democracy. This is a much-needed reframing of what catalyzes civil strife." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
"This urgent, enthralling book will appeal to general readers who are unfamiliar with much recent scholarship on the Confederacy and might give more than a few readers cause to rethink old assumptions about American history." --Booklist, starred review
"[Williams] draws clear comparison to today's political scene, suggesting that true justice and freedom can only be achieved if Americans abandon these harmful fallacies ... An excellent and unflinching examination of the Confederacy, stripping away myths to expose the fanaticism of this harmful and non-representative group of Americans." --Library Journal
"Fearless, factual, and deeply patriotic,
The Confederacy Myth demolishes a century and a half of lies and forces us to confront the truth: the Confederacy was an armed insurrection against the United States, built to protect and expand slavery. The Civil War was a fight over whether democracy and human bondage could coexist in the same republic. They could not. A tour de force that reclaims the story of the United States' finest hour and why it still matters today. Williams writes with moral clarity and a profound belief in the promise of America." - Ty Seidule, Hinchcliff Professor of History, Hamilton College, author of
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause "Connor Williams has executed a moral, constitutional, and rhetorical demolition of the public memory of secession and the Confederacy. Its four-year existence and, even more, its stubborn, mythic afterlife wither under this graceful and stern polemic. The Confederacy was born, writes Williams, in a "treasonous" ideology and its war ended in a spectacularly "failed insurrection." No more "both sides" valor and drama here, no misty reconciliations. A right side and a wrong side fought the Civil War, in Williams's telling, and no amount of revived grievance from the American right ought to tarnish the victory that remade the United States and provided the hope of a pluralistic democracy." - David W. Blight, Yale University, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
"Connor Williams cuts through generations of bombast, delusion, and myth to show how the Confederacy launched a doomed insurrection to create a new nation based on slavery. His unsentimental account, based on sources readers can see for themselves, is a model of honest and patriotic history." - Edward Ayers, President Emeritus - University of Richmond and author of
The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America
