An Interview with Elizabeth Varon

Our conversation with Elizabeth Varon, the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and author of “Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War” published by Oxford University Press. In the interview, Dr. Varon touches on the deeper contested meaning of the iconic surrender at Appomattox Court House. She explains how such feelings spread within the respective armies and onto the homefront. In doing so, Varon argues, the war effectively ended at Appomattox, but battles over what the war truly meant to the likes of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and others was far from over.

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“It made us an ‘is’.”

It’s one of the great quotes, from one of the great documentaries, that sums up the legacy of the American Civil War: Before the war, it was said ‘the United States are’– grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always ‘the […]