Abstract
The American Civil War ended in 1865 with the surrender of the Confederate armies and the abolition of slavery. Yet in the century and a half since Appomattox, Americans have never stopped fighting over what the war meant. For some, the Civil War was a moral crusade that saved the Union and destroyed human bondage. Others insisted it was a noble struggle for “heritage” or states’ rights, stripped of the realities of slavery. Those with strong opinions of the war’s meaning sought to shape the war’s memory through films, monuments, or even professional historical scholarship. What becomes clear, surveying the last 160 years, is that Americans did not inherit a single narrative of the Civil War; they continually remade it. Reconstruction in particular became a battlefield for memory, where political agendas, cultural anxieties, and national identity collided. With such an inherently controversial topic, the public must thoroughly examine how Reconstruction was experienced, distorted, reclaimed, and fought over from 1865 to the present; in this way, the Civil War did not end in 1865, for its meaning has been contested ever since.
Document Type
Paper
Student Type
Undergraduate
Department, Program, or Center
History, Department of
College
College of Liberal Arts
Campus
RIT – Main Campus
Publication Date
2025
Recommended Citation
Held, Daniel, "HIST 101 "The American Civil War ended in 1865 with the surrender of the Confederate armies and the abolition of slavery..."" (2025). Accessed from
https://repository.rit.edu/student/47
Comments
2025 recipient of the Henry and Mary Kearse Writing Award