What’s Up Down South with Julia Nitz

“Remembering the Civil War: Southern American Women Diarists and Their Editors”

Julia Nitz, PhD is Assistant Lecturer for American Studies at Martin-Luther-University, Hall-Wittenburg in Germany, as well as managing director at the Centre for United States Studies (ZUSAS). She is currently conducting research at Chapel Hill libraries as a fellow of the German Historical Institute in Washington.

Free and open to the general public.

ABSTRACT

Many Southern women documented the American Civil War (1861–1865) in diaries. They perceived the conflict as a historical moment and attempted to capture events and the sentiments of their time for posterity. Although these women mainly envisioned their family members as their eventual audience, there was a huge surge in the publication of diaries around the turn of the nineteenth century. This wave of public remembering was initiated and supported institutionally by white supremacist memory groups, such as the all-female United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded 1894). The main objective of these institutions was to challenge the northern Whig interpretation of the Civil War and establish a Lost Cause mythology in its place that strengthened the white South’s claim to social supremacy. As a result, the diaries often were severely edited and annotated before entering the public arena. This talk investigates how collective memory was revised in the editing process by third parties (men and women) as well as by the authors themselves. Nitz will examine individual diaries and their publication history and sketch how the original “experiences” were altered in order to adhere to the propagated grand narrative of the Lost Cause.