Eminent historian C. Vann Woodward presents a vivid collection of essays broadly concerned with contemporary attitudes towards history and historical study. Woodward discusses the dangers and attractions of historical re-enactments in fiction and in the media; the persistance of popular myths about the white anti-slavery movement; the literary phenomenon of the Southern Renaissance; the failure of the post-Civil War Reconstruction and the treatment of that failure by historians; and the uses and abuses of comparative history.