ATTIC ECHOES

Editor’s note: On May 27, 2019—between H.R. Gordon’s work on this essay and its publication—Tony Horwitz, 60, collapsed during a walk and died of a heart attack. His book Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, which examined some of the same issues he explored in his landmark Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War, had just been released. This essay appears in the recently published Emerging Civil War book Entertaining History: The Civil War in Literature, Film, and Song (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020).

America’s fascination with the Civil War may not have changed much since Tony Horwitz explored the South in Confederates in the Attic, but Horwitz said the way people are invested in the history has shifted.

Published in 1999, Confederates in the Attic was Horwitz’s answer to his boyhood passion for the Civil War. The book features Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, as the protagonist, navigating the South and along the way meeting a plethora of characters who share a vibrant passion for the Civil War, history, and Confederate culture. Juggling the opinions of Confederate descendants and their opponents, as well as his own perspective, Horwitz produced a journalistic story with humor and thought-provoking commentary.

Though the book is a seamless recollection of his travels weaved with the history of the sites, his research process for the book was