In 2005 the Tennessee Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) brought suit against Vanderbilt University, challenging Vanderbilt's decision to remove the “Confederate” from Confederate Memorial Hall. Fitzhugh Brundage opened his recent study of The Southern Past (2005) by recounting how Richmond city council recently renamed two bridges that span the James River; formerly named for Confederate generals, the bridges are now named for civil rights activists. Will Kaufman's lively introduction to the Civil War's continuing culture wars is therefore a timely publication for those wondering why the Civil War still resonates in American culture.

Kaufman ranges widely in his analysis, from the “antebellum groundwork” of minstrelsy and literature, to martyrdom via the figures of John Brown, Stonewall Jackson and, of course, Lincoln himself. Women and the war are brought to life via a discussion the “distaff soldiers” of the conflict, and brought up to date with historian Lauren Cook's successful legal challenge against the attempt to ban her from Civil War re-enactments. Moving from “PC” to PCs, a chapter on the “virtual Civil War” explores Civil War-gaming, online and on PS2s, and the study concludes with a brief survey of the “transnational” reverberations of the war and the present-day culture wars as these play out in literature and film.

Given that this is a short, introductory survey, Kaufman has had to be selective. However, it is surprising that more space is not devoted to the early incarnations of the UDC, the many Ladies' Memorial Associations in the South and their role in ensuring that the war entered American culture on Confederate terms, and, crucially, the African American challenge to this via Emancipation Day celebrations. The absence of any discussion of Civil War battlefields seems an avoidance of one of the most significant aspects of the Civil War's modern role. A few errors irritate: Frederick Law Olmsted also wrote the New York Tribune's series, “Southerners at Home” (6); Lincoln was elected in 1860, not 1861 (20); and it was certainly not the case that “the Civil War was the first American war in which conscription manned the armies of both sides” (39). Only 6 percent of Union forces, for example, were raised via the draft. These minor points, however, should not detract from what is a vibrant and engaging study that conveys an enthusiasm for the subject that students, one hopes, will find infectious.