Author : Brian Craig Miller
Release : 2006
Genre : Collective memory
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory by : Brian Craig Miller

Download or read book John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory written by Brian Craig Miller. This book was released on 2006. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the life and memory of Civil War General John Bell Hood, stepping outside of the traditional military biography that focuses mainly on the details of battle experience. Through my understanding of social memory, I have discovered a fundamental problem in how historians have assessed both the life and military career of Hood. Historians have based their final analysis on Hood's life through discovering the point where Hood began a path to ultimate failure as a military commander in the final years of the war. Therefore, since Hood failed in battle, he must have been a failure all throughout his life. In order to reassess Hood's life, he is placed within a cultural context, emphasizing gender and memory, to not only understand Hood's life but also the world which shaped him on a daily basis. Attention is given to Hood's transition from boyhood to manhood in antebellum Kentucky as well as how he forged bonds of brotherhood during his military education. Since Hood lost the use of his left arm and his entire right leg during the war, part of the work examines the crisis in manhood that amputation played for Hood and for his fellow soldiers within the Confederate Army. Men had to make a decision in regards to amputation, as southern women assisted amputees in guaranteeing they hold an honorable and manly position in southern society following the war. The work concludes with an examination of the post-war South confronting defeat and mourning loss. In this period, for his contemporaries and for historians since, Hood's reputation was forged. Hood's death further shaped his memory within his residential city of New Orleans into the modern era, as men and women alike engaged in memory construction to rectify any lost honor through failure in war. Significantly, it is this post-war reflection on Hood's life and career that has shaped the historiography of him as a southern military leader. It was, in short, how the social memory of Hood cast him, and not just actual events of his life, on which historians have been all too willing to rely.