"Court Carney's Reckoning with the devil examines the public memory of notorious Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a man who was a slave trader before the war, was accused of massacring Black Union troops during the war, and became a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the war's aftermath. Racialized violence defined Forrest's life, and his image rested on various facets of white supremacy. Carney's book takes as its subject the construction and expansion of Forrest's public memory as seen in his memorial landscape, the historical writing centered on him, and how he entered popular culture throughout the twentieth century. One connecting thread of the study is the building and ultimate removal of statues of Forrest and how these sites of memory allow for a detailed examination of how he reflects and refracts a white supremacist perspective of the past and present. Unique in its focus, Carney's work offers an original take on a tension-filled and timely topic: how we continue to remember the Civil War and how race informs and explains this process. Carney builds a narrative that clarifies and illuminates the past, explaining, for example, why southerners erected Forrest monuments. He also informs the present moment by exploring how we interpret the Civil War today. Each chapter coheres to a general chronological storyline-the book covers the 1850s to the 2020s-while also exploring the resonance of the way public memory shaped our understanding of Forrest across timelines. Carney's study is unique in that he wrote it from the perspective of a cultural historian rather than a scholar of military history. As a result, Carney interrogates the source material differently from earlier writers and has a different interpretation of Forrest specifically and Civil War memory more broadly. Reckoning with the Devil is a compelling and engaging history that bridges the scholarly audience with general readers interested in making sense of the contemporary moment. The work rests on extensive archival research-including an array of ignored or lesser-known papers and artifacts. It is a study that provides a unique look at Forrest, the construction of Civil War memory, and southern history"--