CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC

PROCEDURE: Use the questions below as a loose guide for interpreting the book.  Ideally, you will write an integrated review of Confederates in the Attic.  It is fully appropriate, however, to answer some of the selected questions directly rather than to write a short essay.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

  1. What draws Horwitz to the Civil War?  How does his own personal history intersect with the war?  What does the war mean to him?  Why, beyond the boyhood cyclorama, do you think Horwitz chooses the Confederates in the Attic title?

  2. "Southerners," says Shelby Foote, "are very strange about that war."  What does the war mean to the individuals interviewed by Horwitz?  What seems to motivate them?  To what extent is their fascination with the Civil War connected to a sense that the "traditional South" is disappearing?

  3. Why is it that reenacting has taken off?  What seems to drive hardcore reenactors?  Why the emphasis on precise details?

  4. Respond to the following statement by Horwitz: "I began to hear echoes of defeated peoples I'd encountered overseas -- Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Catholics in Northern Ireland.  Like them, Southerners had kept fighting their war by other means."

  5. How is the war remembered in the various museums visited by Horwitz?  At the various sites from Antietam to Atlanta to Salisbury, North Carolina and Andersonville that Horwitz visits?

  6. How do the various symbolic battles highlighted by Horwitz add to our understanding?  How, for example, does the Confederate battle flag figure in his account?  What are the various meanings attached to it by the different individuals interviewed?  To what degree are struggles over the flag, or over such issues as Civil War statues or Walt Disney vs.  Manassas Battlefield of significance for the historian?  Focus in on one or two episodes that you find most revealing.

  7. "Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable . . . ," writes Horwitz.  "The best that could be hoped for was a grudging toleration of each other's historical memory.  You Wear Your X, I'll Wear Mine."  To what degree does the book offer evidence of cross-racial dialogue about the meaning of the Civil War?  How do the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement overlap in Horwitz's book?  Here, for example, you might focus in on Selma, Salisbury and Lee-Jackson/King January.

  8. What does one learn about the Civil War from Confederates in the Attic that could not be gained from a more traditional historical overview?