Prof. Silber’s New Book Receives Honorable Mention from NEASA
Professor Nina Silber is the recipient of the Honorable Mention for the 2020 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association for her book This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America.
In their announcement of the award, the NEASA wrote,
Nina Silber’s first book, The Romance of Reunion, emphasized the ways in which the South rewrote history by dominating the national narrative with calls for reunion. In her most recent book, This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) Silber carries that notion forward all the way to World War II, noting the continued popularity of Civil War themes and memorials. Reinvigorating the argument that historical memory helps us to understand and define the present, Silber examines the paradoxical remembrances of the Civil War Era during a period rife with rhetoric about states’ rights, labor and trade organizations, and civil rights agitation. Silber focuses on the unique locus of politics and culture in the creation of an idea of past that harmonizes with the present.