Collector of the Lost Cause

Daniel E. Cone is a former archivist for the National Park Service. He teaches history at Georgia Gwinnett College.

"Cone's deeply researched study makes an archivist the unlikely main subject of historical inquiry. As Cone persuasively explains, Owen's intentional promulgation of the Lost Cause narrative bestowed on that visceral outlook the imprimatur of a respected, scholarly authority. For anyone interested in the cultural endurance of a controversial interpretation of the Civil War, Collector of the Lost Cause is an essential read."-Ben H. Severance, author of A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause "In this well-researched, fascinating study, Daniel Cone has written an important history of the critical, often forgotten role of archives in shaping our memory of the past."-Henry M. McKiven Jr., editor of The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship: The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family "With the politics of history on our minds, Cone's Collector of the Lost Cause is timely. Cone focuses on a human story, that of the Alabama state archive's diligent founder and his wife, as they propagated a heroic version of what the Civil War era meant. This original work deserves a wide audience."-Michael W. Fitzgerald, author of Shades of Complicity: One Family's Experience of Klan Participation