Ghosts of My Old Dominion: Memory and History from the New South stares down the long shadow of the Civil War to reveal how the past haunts the present. Author Greg Bottoms writes fourteen autobiographical tales about his experiences growing up in working-class Virginia during the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a meticulously researched novella of the horrors and sorrows Walt Whitman faced while caring for injured Civil War soldiers in Virginia and D.C.
This ingenious blend of memoir, biography, and criticism uncovers not only the ghosts of history, but the ghosts of a life held together despite it all. Bottoms confronts the legacy of racism in the American South, including his own family's participation in "white flight" and matters of class and religion throughout his formative years, and cuts through the noise of our current era to remind us of essential human things. Ghosts of My Old Dominion is a book of true stories and a book about stories—how the personal and intimate moments in a life are always bled through with the colors of history.
