The meaning of the Civil War, America’s most violent experience, continued to be debated well into the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The long shadow cast by David Blight’s influential Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) has meant that debates about the impact and prevalence of reconciliationist rhetoric dominate the literature. This paper adds to a growing body of scholarship that questions the reconciliationist narrative and stresses instead the partisan understanding of the Civil War still prevalent into the twentieth century. In particular, this article uses Theodore Roosevelt’s “memory” of the Civil War to explore the linkages between the Civil War Era and the Age of Empire. It makes two arguments: 1) that in an era when a “reconciliationist” understanding of the Civil War was becoming more prominent, more often than not Roosevelt used his voice as a historian and political figure to assert a “Unionist” interpretation; and 2) that Roosevelt used this memory of the Civil War to advocate for three specific political causes: American empire, the New Nationalism, and American entry into World War I. The paper’s argument and historiographical intervention help scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to re-imagine the role of Civil War memory in the half century following Appomattox Courthouse.

中文翻译：

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西奥多·罗斯福和内战的联邦记忆：经验、历史和政治，1861-1918

南北战争是美国最暴力的经历，其意义一直持续到镀金时代和进步时代。大卫·布莱特 (David Blight) 的影响力投下的长影种族与团聚：美国记忆中的内战(2001) 意味着关于和解主义言论的影响和流行的辩论在文献中占主导地位。这篇论文增加了越来越多的学术机构，这些学术机构质疑和解主义的叙述，而是强调对内战的党派理解在 20 世纪仍然盛行。特别是，本文使用西奥多·罗斯福对内战的“记忆”来探讨内战时代与帝国时代之间的联系。它提出了两个论点：1）在一个“和解主义者”对内战的理解变得更加突出的时代，罗斯福经常以他作为历史学家和政治人物的声音来主张“统一主义者”的解释；2）罗斯福利用这段内战记忆来倡导三个具体的政治事业：美国帝国，