The Limits of the Lost Cause: Essays on Civil War Memory

The Limits of the Lost Cause challenges prevailing ways of thinking about the impact of the Civil War on the American South. Above all, Gaines Foster’s work encourages Americans to confront the new divisions within their society even as they wrestle with old national―not just southern―failings.

Gaines M. Foster is the Murphy J. Foster Professor of History Emeritus at Louisiana State University and author of Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913.