Cornerstone of the Confederacy (eBook)

Alexander Stephens and the Speech that Defined the Lost Cause

Keith Hebert (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1
303 Seiten
University of Tennessee Press (Verlag)
978-1-62190-635-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Born in early 1812 in Crawfordville, Georgia, Alexander Stephens grew up in an antebellum South that would one day inform the themes of his famous Cornerstone Speech. While Stephens made many speeches throughout his lifetime, the Cornerstone Speech is the discourse for which he is best remembered. Stephens delivered it on March 21, 1861one month after his appointment as vice president of the Confederacyasserting that slavery and white supremacy comprised the cornerstone of the Confederate States of America. Within a few short weeks, more than two hundred newspapers worldwide had reprinted Stephens's words. Following the war and the defeat of the Confederacy, Stephens claimed that his assertions in the Cornerstone Speech had been misrepresented, his meaning misunderstood, as he sought to breathe new and different life into an oration that may have otherwise been forgotten. His intentionally ambiguous rhetoric throughout the postwar years obscured his true antebellum position on slavery and its centrality to the Confederate Nation and lent itself to early constructions of Lost Cause mythology. InCornerstone of the Confederacy, Keith Hebert examines how Alexander Stephens originally constructed, and then reinterpreted, his well-known Cornerstone Speech. Hebert illustrates the complexity of Stephens's legacy across eight chronological chapters, meticulously tracing how this speech, still widely cited in the age of Black Lives Matter, reverberated in the nation's consciousness during Reconstruction, through the early twentieth century, and in debates about commemoration of the Civil War that live on in the headlines today. Audiences both inside and outside of academia will quickly discover that the book's implications span far beyond the memorialization of Confederate symbols, grappling with the animating ideas of the past and discovering how these ideas continue to inform the present.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.9.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► 20. Jahrhundert bis 1945
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Schlagworte: 19th-century politics • Abraham Lincoln • Alexander Stephens • American Civil War • American consciousness • American Politics • Antebellum South • Black lives matter • civil war history • commemoration debates • Complex legacy • Confederacy • Confederate monuments • Confederate narrative • Confederate symbols • Confederate vice president • Cornerstone Speech • Cultural Memory • emancipationists • Gettysburg Address • historical discourse • Historical reinterpretation • Jefferson Davis • Keith Hébert • Lost Cause • Lost Cause Mythology • memorialization • newspaper reprints • Nineteenth-Century history • postwar rhetoric • reconciliasts • reconstruction • reconstruction era • Robert E. Lee • Slavery • slavery and white supremacy • societal impact • southern history • speeches in history • themes of the South
• ISBN-10: 1-62190-635-3 / 1621906353
• ISBN-13: 978-1-62190-635-3 / 9781621906353