Course Guide ~ HIST 373 / Environmental Catastrophes

QUESTION:
Which of the items below is a primary source? Which is a secondary source?

• Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dell Press, 1963.
   
• Catton, Bruce. The Centennial History of the Civil War. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961.
   
• King, Martin L. Martin Luther King: "I Have a Dream." Oak Forest, IL: MPI Home Video, 2005.
   
• Warren, Robert P. The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial. New York: Random House, 1961.
   
• Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

ANSWER:
Read the following passage from David W. Blight's American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) and reconsider you answer to the previous exercise.

"This study of the Civil War's literary and intellectual history, as well as its popular memory, engages the compelling question of how the United States, to an important degree, is the stories it tells itself about its Civil War and its enduring aftermath. Throughout the generations, up to the historical moment of the war's Sesquicentennial, those stories have had lasting consequences. In this book, I examine the lives of four of America's most important writers on the subject of the significance and legacies of the Civil War during the 1950s and 1960s. I have chosen each of the four writers--Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin--for particular and representative reasons." From the  author's prologue.