UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

Edited by Martin H. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown,
and Donald Yacovone
Foreword by General Colin L. Powell

Semifinalist, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for the year 2000

Examines the lasting influence of the most famous black military unit of the Civil War

The monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, located on Boston Common, stands at a symbolic crossroads of American history. A reminder of the nation's ongoing struggle over race, it captures the Civil War's higher purpose—the end of slavery—and memorializes those black soldiers and white officers who made common cause in the service of freedom. The monument and the saga of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment remain powerful touchstones, inspiring enduring meditations such as Robert Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead" and the popular film Glory.

This volume brings together the best new scholarship on the history of the 54th, the formation of collective memory and identity, and the ways Americans have responded to the story of the regiment and the Saint-Gaudens monument. Contributors use the historical record and popular remembrance of the 54th as a lens for examining race and community in the United States. The essays range in time from the mid- nineteenth century to the present and encompass history, literature, art, music, and popular culture.

In addition to the editors and General Colin Powell, who writes about the memory and example of the 54th in his own career, contributors include Stephen Belyea, David W. Blight, Thomas Cripps, Kathryn Greenthal, James Oliver Horton, Edwin S. Redkey, Marilyn Richardson, Kirk Savage, James Smethurst, Cathy Stanton, Helen Vendler, Denise Von Glahn, and Joan Waugh.

"These fine essays cover a good deal of ground—art history, musicology, literary criticism, history—and reflect the splendid, spirited public conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of Saint-Gauden's memorial to the Massachusetts 54th."

William S. McFeely, author of Frederick Douglass
"In its depth and breadth, Hope and Glory can be profitably read by students of the Civil War, race relations, art history, literary criticism, Victorian studies, and the history of memory."

James Cullen, author of The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past

Martin H. Blatt is chief of cultural resources and historian at the Boston National Historical Park.

Thomas J. Brown is assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina.

Donald Yacovone is associate editor at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

American History / Military History / Black Studies
368 pp., 30 illus.
$40.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-277-1
2000

Published in association with the Massachusetts Historical Society

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