Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten
Subtitle: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War
By: Gary W. Gallagher
Series: The Steven and Janice Brose lectures in the Civil War era
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9780807832066
Subjects: War films -- United States -- History and criticism; Historical films -- United States -- History and criticism; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Motion pictures and the war; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Causes; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Historiography
First sentence: On October 4, 1993, a full house at Washington's national Theatre watched the world premiere of 'Gettysburg', a Turner Pictures film based on Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'The Killer Angels'.
Description: Describes how the depiction of the Civil War in motion pictures and works of art distorts the reality of the war, often emphasizing how the South fought for an admirable but hopeless cause and minimizing the Union effort to hold the republic together.

More than 60,000 books have been published on the Civil War. Most Americans, though, get their ideas about the war--why it was fought, what was won, what was lost--not from books but from movies, television, and other popular media. Too often those portrayals overlook many of the very ideas that motivated the generation that fought the war. In an engaging and accessible survey, Civil War historian Gary Gallagher guides readers through the stories told in recent film and art, showing how they have both reflected and influenced the political, social, and racial currents of their times. The most influential perspective for the Civil War generations, says Gallagher, is almost entirely absent from the Civil War stories being told today. Gallagher argues that popular understandings of the war have been shaped by four traditions that arose in the nineteenth century and continue to the present: the Lost Cause, in which Confederates are seen as having waged an admirable struggle against hopeless odds; the Union Cause, which frames the war as an effort to maintain a viable republic in the face of secessionist actions; the Emancipation Cause, in which the war is viewed as a struggle to liberate 4 million slaves and eliminate a cancerous influence on American society; and the Reconciliation Cause, which represents attempts by northern and southern whites to extol "American" virtues and mute the role of African Americans.
Notes: Includes illustrations, bibliographical references (p. [213]-257) and index.
"A Caravan book"--T.p. verso.
Table of contents: title: Introduction
pagenum: 1; label: 1
title: A Contested Historical Landscape: The Civil War Generation Interprets the Conflicts
pagenum: 15; label: 2
title: Going but Not Yet Gone: The Confederate War on Film
pagenum: 41; label: 3
title: Emancipation and Reconciliation but Not the Union: Hollywood and the North's Civil War
pagenum: 91; label: 4
title: Brushes, Canvases, and the Lost Cause: The Ascendancy of Confederate Themes in Recent Civil War Art
pagenum: 135; title: Epilogue
pagenum: 209; title: Notes
pagenum: 213; title: Acknowledgments
pagenum: 259; title: Index
pagenum: 261