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The Winter program of the Chattahoochee Valley Historical Society (CVHS) will be held virtually at 3 p.m. EST on Sunday, January 26th.

The presenter will be Dr. Keith Bohannon, a longtime instructor of history at the University of West Georgia and an authority on the history of the Nineteenth Century South (both before and after the Civil War). This will be Dr. Bohannon’s second program for the CVHS. He’d earlier made an in-person presentation several years ago highlighting education in antebellum Georgia.

His upcoming presentation will focus on what has long been called the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

In the decades following the U.S. Civil War, many if not most white Southerners embraced a mythology to justify the causes of the Civil War and to have reasons for the Northern victory and the Southern defeat. This movement began in the years immediately following the Civil War widely known as the Reconstruction Period.

From 1865 until 1877, the post-War South was under federal military occupation. The white population of the South had to renounce the Confederacy in order to regain U.S. citizenship. This process became more complicated during the eight years U.S. Grant was president.

In the post-War South, the white population was divided into two factions – the so-called scalawags, white Southerners who supported Reconstruction and denounced what had been the Confederacy and those who wanted to redeem the South from Union control. It’s from former Confederate soldiers and their officers that the Lost Cause ideology emerged. Reconstruction ended in March 1877, but the Lost Cause movement and mythology lasted far longer.

The central tenets of the Lost Cause appear in inscriptions on Confederate monuments, in films such as Gone With the Wind and in many generations of textbooks used in Southern classrooms.

Lost Cause interpretations are still present in Southern society today and are often heard in debates over Confederate monuments and symbols. Although many in the southeastern U.S. today are not as aware of this movement, its beliefs and key arguments have permeated social and historical perspectives on the Civil War and its legacy even into the 21st Century. Dr. Bohannon’s presentation will explore and discuss this.

Dr. Bohannon is a professor of history at the University of West Georgia and teaches courses in Georgia history, the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Antebellum South. He is a native of Smyrna, Ga. but his mother is a LaGrange native and has roots in Troup and Meriwether counties dating to the 1820s.

“Join us for this very informative and interesting presentation this coming Sunday afternoon,” said program chairman Charles  Powers. “To attend this virtual meeting email me at ccpowers02@gmail.com prior to 12 noon EST on Sunday, January 26th. You will then be sent a Zoom link with instructions of h0w to join the meeting.”