Tuesday, March 27, 2012

A defense of Southern memoirs

Robert K. Krick, author and Civil War historian, assails critics of Confederate officers’ accounts


Civil War historian Robert K. Krick is a careful scholar. He loves primary sources—documents written by participants at the time—since memory sometimes plays tricks with the facts.

But he’s had it with fellow historians who’ve dismissed swaths of memoirs written by Confederate military officers as unreliable.

Krick, who lives in Fredericksburg, let fly those feelings during a daylong, statewide symposium hosted Thursday by the Virginia Military Institute’s Center for Leadership & Ethics.

He and Penn State professor Carol Reardon led a panel on “Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia,” held at the Virginia Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission’s 2012 Signature Conference.

Krick, retired chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, mounted a vigorous defense of Confederate memoirs as valuable historical sources. He decried modern writers who appear to distrust such accounts as tainted by “Lost Cause” mythology.

One “inane strain” of that criticism, he said, holds that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee wasn’t really so popular among his troops and Southern citizens at the time.

More @ Fredericksburg. Com

3 comments:

  1. F***ing arrogant yankees...

    You should believe THEIR version of history - written 150+ years after the fact - rather than the version written by the men who LIVED it...

    Good G*d - ain't it time for round two YET??!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. ain't it time for round two YET??!!

    Looks like we're approaching it.:)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I decided long ago, I would give my life for the Confederate flag. Many think Gen Lee was the finest soldier we ever produced. He has been a role model for me since I was little. I think the young today need to believe in a good role model. I tell the story of the Confederacy when I sutler at events. If I am killed there, I hope to go up and live with my fellow Virginians!

    ReplyDelete