In his best-selling book Confederates in the Attic (Vintage, $14.00), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and war correspondent Tony Horwitz discovers one of America's favorite new pastimes-Civil War reenactments. This hobby carries getting a feel for your ancestors' lives to an extreme: joining the ranks of the cold and uncomfortable for a weekend, gnawing on beef jerky and soaking uniform buttons in urine for an "authentic" look. After participating in a reenactment weekend himself, Horwitz couldn't help wondering about the appeal of re-living such an unpleasant period in history. The answer, as Horwitz shares in this Family Tree Magazine Q&A, isn't so simple.

Q: Why are Civil War reenactments so popular?

Reenacting reflects a populism that's come into history. People are much less interested in great leaders, for instance, than they were 20 or 30 years ago. If you went to a Civil War roundtable 30 years ago, likely they'd be talking about Lee and Grant and Stonewall Jackson. And they still do that, but people are just as interested now in the average soldier. Their own great-grandfather was more likely an average private, not a grand figure. It's this desire to get your hands dirty, to do the history yourself, to bring it down to the popular level. One thing that reenactors will always tell you is, "We're here to remember the experience of the common soldier, North and South."

Q: Why do many Americans remain so intrigued by the Civil War?

One reason it lingers is that many of the issues at stake in the war are still unresolved. Race is still at the center of our national debate, states' rights is still a very vibrant political philosophy, and even the largest question posed by the war, "Are we one nation?" is still relevant. It's not a regional question anymore, but we're sometimes asking ourselves, "Are we a bunch of angry interest groups and ethnic groups and gender groups in a sort of unhappy marriage of convenience?"

We are a nation with fissures. We're lucky now with the economy going as well as it is that we're going through a period of mellow feelings. The racial divisions and other things we've had in the past are less acute at the moment, but I don't think they're lingering far beneath the surface.

Q: How would you compare Americans and their feelings about the Civil War to other countries where you've worked as a war correspondent?

I don't think Americans are really comparable to others I met overseas who are still agonizing over historical conflicts. Given how many Americans died in the Civil War-two percent of the population, equivalent to 5 million people today-and how the South was devastated socially and economically, it's remarkable how quickly we've reconciled and for the most part left the conflict behind. I think our continuing passions over the Civil War are remarkable when you compare them to our attitude toward the rest of our history (which we tend to forget), but they aren't striking in a global context, where people often nurse historic grudges for many centuries.

Q: Are reenactors trying to get in touch with the history of the United States, or are they more interested in learning about their personal ancestry?

I think they're more interested in their ancestors. I think there's almost an ancestor envy at work among a lot of people who have immersed themselves in their genealogy. We live in a time that's wonderfully prosperous and secure in the 1990s, but it lacks a certain drama. And I think people look back to this period as being somehow larger than life, where people were living and dying for a cause. And that's why it's so bewitching, and people try to travel back to that time through genealogy, through trying to get to know their great-grandfather and what he did, or the women.

It reflects a search for meaning, a search for roots. We live in a time when we feel alienated from the landscape, sometimes alienated from each other. People move so much, people change jobs. It's a way of connecting, to understand why you're here and feel some stronger tie to America and your landscape.

There's also a natural cycle that occurs. I don't think it's an accident that we're so interested in World War II now; it's about 50 years after the event. The high tide of Civil War remembrance was about 50 years after the war. It's when the veterans themselves start to die off that people think, "My gosh, let's honor this generation." When we look at [war veterans], we see people who seem nobler than ourselves, who made real sacrifices. Somehow they were tougher than us. They had these antique American virtues of stoicism and self-reliance that perhaps we've lost in the late 20th century.