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Lee is intertwined within this autobiographical and historical account, as Lee represents everything that makes the ‘Lost Cause,’ a false narrative.

The mythology surrounding Confederate General Robert E. Throughout the book, Seidule unapologetically champions new Civil War memorials that he argues both change and correct history, describing that “it’s recovering a story lost and creating a more accurate portrayal of the past.” Seidule incorporates personal experiences, such as his childhood in Alexandria, Va., to provide context for his background where he “never understood the repugnant nature of slavery or the powerful history of African Americans in my city.” This book provides a topical analysis regarding how the South lost the Civil War but won the narrative. Lee and Me lies Seidule’s conflicting relationship with ‘Lost Cause’ mythology that he was raised to believe and in time has worked to deconstruct. Six years later, Seidule still receives hate emails and likely will receive a new batch from ‘Lost Cause’ sympathizers who claim that the Civil War was fought for a variety of reasons unrelated to slavery. The book opens with an anecdote regarding a video featuring Seidule’s conclusion that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Lee and Me is a controversial, compelling read. Professors Seidule and Isserman assigned an essay that called for students to determine how “popular works of art, blending fiction with history reshaped historical memory of the Civil War in the last decades of the 20th century. Lee and Me that is, to deconstruct the ‘Lost Cause’ mythology.

The structure of ‘The American Civil War’ class lent itself to the mission of Seidule’s recently published book, Robert E. As a retired brigadier general and professor emeritus of history at West Point, Seidule provided students in the class with anecdotes from the years he spent serving the country. In particular, his lectures on battle strategy, weaponry, technology, and conversations regarding slavery and racial tensions that exist today, demonstrate how the Civil War shaped our nation into the country that it is now. This past fall semester, I had the great fortune of enrolling in ‘The American Civil War,’ a course co-taught by Professor Maurice Isserman and Professor Seidule.