Suggested material for Week Four on the power of the Lost Cause

Three motion pictures set out below and the PBS series Reconstruction is a good start for this week.

Also

A PBS film that explores the controversy over Griffith's film Birth of a Nation

Canadian Paul Salzman returns to Mississippi aftter forty five years to encounter the individual who beat him up back in 1965. This excellent film would also be valuable for the subsequent 

week on the nightmare of Jim Crow

The first major television series to challenge the Lost Cause

   
Three articles worth reading are "Mildred Rutherford's War" in The  New York Review of Books, Dec. 7, 2023 and "Here's the Civil War  They Don't Want You Know," in The Washington Post, Dec.20, 2023

and "Kennedy and the Lost Cause," in The Atlantic, Dec. 2023.

Clint Smith, poet, scholar and writer for The Atlantic has written a series of essays about sites throughout America that examines how they are currently dealing with the racial cultural changes of recent years. In one of them, a Confederate cemetary he listens to Sons of Confederates who insist that messages that they learned over the years about the nobility and rightness of the Lost Cause are important to preserve. Smith rightly remains sceptical. This is a fascinating book.