The Lost Cause Summary

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The editors Gary Gallagher and Alan Nolan intend to construct, through essays from various authors, a meaningful explanation of the Lost Cause as a myth. Gallagher and Nolan build on previous literature in engaging various aspects of the white South's response to defeat, and the attempt to create a past that is suitable for the South. The book takes the views of nine historians and offers different relationships between the Civil War and the Lost Cause. The book provides the modern historian's interpretations of the Lost Cause relating to a specific aspect of the Civil War. The authors in the book are in agreement with the current scholarship that the Lost Cause is a myth while showing the origins, development, and influence of the Lost Cause.

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