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A review by lookingglasswar
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
3.0
3.5 stars. Horwitz was a really engaging writer and this is a great travelogue, but his failure to treat seriously with race and the Civil War makes this book really lacking. I don't know if it's because historical memory of the Civil War was so different in the 90s or what, but the fact that Horwitz only glancingly engages with race is glaring to any 2022 reader. Even when he meets with neo-Confederates and people who openly tell him they are racist, he has little to say about the subject and never really unpacks it, even when handed giftwrapped opportunities.
I'd be interested in a thematic response from today that undergoes the same project Horwitz did but with the much more loaded context of today, where acknowledging race and history is forbidden in schools due to panics about "CRT," where the nation is in the middle of a reckoning over policing and its origins in slave patrols, and where a third of the country is dedicated to revanchist racism, even at their own expense. And especially now, when the fight for individual and bodily autonomy is raging once more.
I'd be interested in a thematic response from today that undergoes the same project Horwitz did but with the much more loaded context of today, where acknowledging race and history is forbidden in schools due to panics about "CRT," where the nation is in the middle of a reckoning over policing and its origins in slave patrols, and where a third of the country is dedicated to revanchist racism, even at their own expense. And especially now, when the fight for individual and bodily autonomy is raging once more.