Historians and voracious readers alike were stunned to learn of the death of journalist Tony Horwitz at 60 years of age. His works, in newspapers, magazines, and several books, have covered a wonderful mélange of American life and memory for decades. For many historians, his death was a shock precisely because he’d produced several critical works that have been incredibly useful in the classroom—arguably, none as well known as Confederates in the Attic. We should pause and reflect on Horwitz’s work, and how it shows that there are journalists and others outside the traditional academic field of history who can talk and write about history in a nuanced way that is useful for a lay audience.
Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic is a book many historians—especially those dealing with the American South or American memory—have read, discussed, and enjoyed since its release in 1998. A chronicle of some of the ways the American Civil War is still with us, Confederates in the Attic was Horwitz’s way of tackling the messy past and present of remembering the American Civil War. Further, it is a book about forgetting: forgetting in the sense of forgetting or ignoring the war’s beginnings due to slavery, and the long legacy its aftermath still has in the United States today. For intellectual historians, especially, works like Confederates in the Attic show the public’s interest in topics such as the intersection of memory and race.
Horwitz had the gift that some journalists and writers have—of being able to meld research, interviews, and graceful prose together to craft a work that is accessible and moving. I suspect this is why his death has hit historians so hard. With the debate about how much historians are producing work for the public continuing to rage, Horwitz never seemed to feel any trepidation about writing and working as both a journalist and a historian. His work, especially on the South, always seemed timely, as though he understood how the region’s past and future were a gateway into thinking about the United States as a whole.
His final book, Spying on the South, sounded interesting and is one I hope to check out soon. Using the figure of Frederick Law Olmstead, Horwitz wanted to ask difficult questions about the unity of the United States in the present by using its divides in the past as a tool. One wonders what kind of scholarly and public debates his newest—and, unfortunately, final—book will cause. But what is clear is that the publishing world lost a titan in Horwitz.
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