The Novelist and the Civil War
Because I’m behind the times (the Internet times, that is—they move so fast and I’m already stuck at least a decade ago), I’ve just now gotten around to reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ long-form article on...
View ArticleThe Tragedy of War is the Tragedy of Men
Ta-Nehisi Coates continues to wonder about the relationships between and among war, tragedy, and justice: There’s a hazy line between my posts arguing that the Civil War wasn’t tragic, and my posts on...
View ArticlePressures from the Home Front
While Confederate women and civilians pressured their sons, husbands, brothers, and fellow-citizens into fighting, those men, like one lieutenant wrote, “asked himself the question: What is this all...
View ArticleFoote’s Civil War: Spotsylvania and the Death of Jeb Stuart
As the narrator turns his eye to Grant’s first Eastern campaign—the Forty Days—the shift is from chivalry to butchery, or even from an older war closer to our myths to something more terrible because...
View ArticleFoote’s Civil War, Volume II: Tragedy and Just Causes
I finished Volume II of Foote’s Civil War over the last two days of Passover, and returned to the internet this morning to find two posts at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog with the title and thesis: “The Civil...
View ArticleFoote’s Historia
There’s something to be said for attempting to read Foote’s Civil War at the same time as Proust. I don’t know that I would have otherwise noticed quirks of structure in Foote’s work that, rather than...
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