Jeffrey Olick theorizes that once" memory of... personally traumatic experience is externalized and objective as narrative... it is no longer a purely individual psychological trauma"(345). This notion may explain the sometimes galvanizing role of history long after its partici pants are gone; collective experiences such as mass hunger become exter nal narratives, no longer dependent on individual sensory perceptions but available within the culture as abstract frameworks for viewing indi vidual experiences. This paper will argue that Margaret Mitchell s Gone with the Wind demonstrates how individual losses of sovereignty by land owners in the American South during Reconstruction come to consti tute a shared trauma of usurped sovereignty that remained legible in the collective memory of the Depression Era South and explore the ramifica tions of those re-engaged losses in the form of extralegal violence against African Americans.

The notion of" sovereignty" is useful to considering a text about Recon struction due to its dual meanings, both of which implicate property and ownership. In one sense, according to Webster's Dictionary, sovereignty means" supreme power, especially over a body politic." The acquisition and loss of sovereignty by the Confederacy is, of course, the central legal event of the Civil War, and the exclusion, through disenfranchisement,