July 12, 2002

The Civil War in History and Memory

By DAVID W. BLIGHT

The concepts of history and memory represent two attitudes toward the past, two streams of historical consciousness that must at some point flow together. History -- what trained historians do -- is a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research; it tends to be critical and skeptical of human motive and action, and therefore more secular than what people commonly refer to as memory. History can be read by or belong to everyone; it assesses change and progress over time, and is

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