Remembering The Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (New Directions in Southern History)
""Levin offers something new and valuable in this book. His approach of unpacking the complex telling and forgetting of the events surrounding one battle allows him a focus and specificity that even many very good treatments of historical memory often lack. Remembering the Battle of the Crater stands to make a real and lasting contribution to the field of Civil War memory studies."--Anne Marshall, author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State" --""[Remembering The Battle of the Crater] centers on the well documented 'massacre' of the United States Colored Troops by Confederate soldiers during and after the battle, carrying the story on through the eras of the Lost Cause, Virginia's Reconstruction and Readjuster Movement. Levin's work offers a refreshing and inquisitive look at the battle and how the role of the USCT's is now coming into light in subsequent preservation and interpretation efforts."-- Chris Calkins, Former Chief of Interpretation/Historian (Ret.), Petersburg National Battlefield" --""This is an important study of memory, race, and the Battle of the Crater. Levin traces the troubled story of how the Mine Attack at Petersburg was remembered by survivors and contemporary generations alike, and he makes clear and frank judgments about the tortured ways in which Americans have dealt with, or avoided, key racial aspects of the battle. Levin offers significant and convincing insights as he sheds light on our understanding of historical memory."--Earl J. Hess, author of Into the Crater -- The Mine Attack at Petersburg" --""In this stunning and well-researched book, Kevin Levin catches the new waves of the study of memory, black soldiers, and the darker underside of the Civil War as well as anyone has. That horrible day at the Crater in Petersburg, its brutal racial facts and legacies, all tangled in the weeds of Confederate Lost Cause lore, have never been exposed like this. Levin is both superb scholar and public historian, showing us a piece of the real war that does now get into the books, as well as into site interpretation."--David W. Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era" --