Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century By Nicole Maurantonio

Abstract

Confederate Exceptionalism uses public memory as a lens through which to view the fusion of Lost Cause ideology and American exceptionalism embodied in “textual practices that alternately embrace and revise the Confederacy’s racial history” (p.2). Maurantonio uses the concept of a museum as an institution that “anchor[s] identities to objects, stories, and people” to argue that “memory makers have capitalized” on such tangible markers to normalize “the myth of Confederate exceptionalism” (pp.16-17). Her concept of museums thus extends beyond physical structures to include “everything from cookbooks to monuments, taxidermied horses to living historians” in the state of Virginia (p. 17).