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"LOST CAUSE"

"LOST CAUSE" refers to the shared public memory constructed by late–nineteenth-century white southerners of a romantic pre-Civil War South and a noble Confederate crusade. The central institutions of the "Lost Cause" were postwar Confederate organizations that conducted ceremonial rituals, sponsored writings and oratory, and erected Confederate monuments that shaped southern perceptions of war and defeat. The name for this tradition came from the title of Edward A. Pollard's 1866 book The Lost Cause.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, eds. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Cynthia R. Poe

See also Civil War; Richmond; Sectionalism.