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A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868. By Anne Sarah Rubin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xii, 319 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2928-5.)
Southerners have clung stubbornly to their regional identity, and Anne Sarah Rubin argues in this book that "The identity that they created as Confederates outlasted the Confederacy itself" (p. 3). Considering a nation not as a state, but as "an emotional, ideological, and frequently sentimentalized construct" (p. 2), she examines the development of that construct in the years 1861-1868.
Her study first probes a variety of ways in which wartime southerners tried to express Confederate patriotism-through diaries, pamphlets, fiction, schoolbooks, sermons, views on personal suffering and sacrifice, and attitudes toward Yankees, slaves, and defeat. Then, in treating the...