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Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South

Amazon.com Price:  $15.00 (as of 06/05/2019 08:41 PST- Details)

Description

As rancorous debates over Confederate symbols continue, Robert Bonner explores how the revolt flag gained its enormous power to inspire and repel. In the process, he shows how the Confederacy sustained itself for so long as it did by cultivating the allegiances of countless abnormal citizens. Bonner also comments more broadly on flag passions–those intense emotional reactions to waving pieces of cloth that inflame patriots to kill and die.

Colors and Blood depicts a pervasive flag culture that set the emotional tone of the Civil War in the Union in addition to the Confederacy. Northerners and southerners alike devoted improbable energy to flags, but the Confederate project was once unique in creating a set of national symbols from scratch. In describing the activities of white southerners who designed, sewed, celebrated, sang about, and bled for their new country’s most visible symbols, the book charts the emergence of Confederate nationalism. Theatrical flag performances that cast secession in a melodramatic mode both amplified and contained patriotic emotions, contributing to a flag-centered popular patriotism that motivated true believers to defy and sacrifice. This wartime flag culture nourished Confederate nationalism for four years, but flags’ martial associations in the end eclipsed their expression of political independence. After 1865, conquered banners evoked valor and heroism even as obscuring the ideology of a slaveholders’ rise up, and white southerners recast the totems of Confederate nationalism as relics of the Lost Cause.

At the heart of this story is the tremendous capacity of bloodshed to infuse symbols with emotional power. Confederate flag culture, black southerners’ charged relationship to the Stars and Stripes, latest efforts to banish the Southern Cross, and arguments over burning the Star Spangled Banner have this in common: all demonstrate Americans’ passionate relationship with symbols which have been imaginatively soaked in blood.

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