"In the last 10 to 15 years, a number of historians have become interested in the problem of historical memory: how groups or nations, cultures remember as a whole, how collective memory is used for identity," Blight told The Student, referring to the current movement of historians into the field of historical memory. "I became interested in this approach to history in the late 1980s when I was writing my first book, an intellectual autobiography of Frederick Douglass. In the last third of Douglass' life, he spent a great deal of his public life trying to preserve a black abolitionist memory of the Civil War."
Blight said that the experience of writing that book led to his desire "to write something bigger about how Americans, North and South, black and white, developed collective memory of what the Civil War had been about-the history of how these people developed collective memory."
"Race and Reunion" explores how different versions of memory fought for power.
"It's ultimately all about politics of conflicting interpretations of history," Blight said. "It's about who gets to control the version of the past, who gets to control what might get to become the dominant or the official memory."
National memories are always contested versions of the past, said Blight. "The memory of the Civil War in America is probably the most conflicted period in American history. It is ultimately a story all about race."
Describing the consequences of the suppression of emancipationist versions of the war, Blight writes, "Reconciliation between North and South could tragically only be accomplished by the re-subjugation of the very people the war had freed."
As well as the title of his new book, "Race and Reunion" is also a title of a seminar Blight taught at Amherst, which he said he found to be an invaluable experience in the development of his book.
"I taught that seminar three or four times during the past eight years, and it has been extremely useful to me. There were several Amherst students who are acknowledged in the back of the book who became research assistants after taking that seminar," said Blight. "Frankly, some of them were absolutely crucial to getting a lot of that research done. It was a great opportunity to try out the problem of how America, North and South, black and white, developed historical memories of slavery, of Reconstruction, over the 50 or 60 year period after the war."
"I treated that course as a cultural history course about Civil War memory," Blight added. "I learned a lot from their term papers. It is a wonderful example of what can happen at Amherst College; the student gets engaged, the faculty member gets to try out ideas, and everybody benefits. It allows you to cultivate the scholarly project you are pursuing, and it gets students engaged in original work."
"Race and Reunion" was published by Harvard University Press.