UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

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

Semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award

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 54 th Massachusetts 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 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 54 th 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 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.

“An essential book, helping us to understand how history, memory, monuments, and myth intertwine to keep the present comforted and discomforted by the past.”

Journal of American History

“An excellent, readable book full of thoughtful and provocative analysis from leading scholars. . . . It adds much to our understanding of black Americans’ contributions to the Civil War.”

New England Quarterly

“This is a book—intelligent, sensitive, beautifully written, and well integrated despite its diversity of authors—that speaks eloquently to anyone interested in the soul of America.”

North Carolina Historical Review

Martin H. Blatt is chief of cultural resources and historian at Boston National Historical Park. Thomas J. Brown is associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina. Donald Yacovone is Research Manager and Fellows Officer Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

American History / Military History / Black Studies
368 pp., 30 illus.
$24.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-722-1
May 2009 (hardcover edition published in 2001)

Published in association with the Massachusetts Historical Society

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