U. S. Grant
American Hero, American Myth
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
At the time of his death, Ulysses S. Grant was the most famous person in America, considered by most citizens to be equal in stature to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Yet today his monuments are rarely visited, his military reputation is overshadowed by that of Robert E. Lee, and his presidency is permanently mired at the bottom of historical rankings. In U. S. Grant, Joan Waugh investigates Grant’s place in public memory and the reasons behind the rise and fall of his renown, while simultaneously underscoring the fluctuating memory of the Civil War itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How does national memory determine national heroes? Waugh, a UCLA history professor, probes the subject in an engaging study of the making of Ulysses S. Grant's reputation. At the time of his death in 1885, he was perceived as on a level with George Washington by former Unionists and Confederates alike. His memoirs were a bestseller. His image combined the honorable soldier and the generous victor: a heroic war leader who believed in the ideal of national reconciliation in both regional and racial contexts. Even Grant's flaws were part of his greatness, linking him to his countrymen in a distinctively American fashion. That image began to change as lost cause romanticism nurtured reinterpreting the Civil War as not merely tragic but arguably unnecessary. The eclipse of this approach has restored Grant's reputation as a general. Now his presidency is the target of criticism: corrupt, ineffective and above all incomplete in terms of the racial issue. Waugh convincingly interprets Grant as "symboliz both the hopes and the lost dreams" of the Civil War. But while that war remains our defining and dividing event, Grant's image, Waugh says, will remain ambiguous. 69 illus., 3 maps.
