The Imagined Civil War

Download or read book The Imagined Civil War written by Alice Fahs and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking work of cultural history, Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War--the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Fahs mines these rich but long-neglected resources to recover the diversity of the war's political and social meanings. Instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals to the nation. Works that explored the war's devastating impact on white women's lives, for example, proclaimed the importance of their experiences on the home front, while popular writings that celebrated black manhood and heroism in the wake of emancipation helped readers begin to envision new roles for blacks in American life. Recovering a lost world of popular literature, The Imagined Civil War adds immeasurably to our understanding of American life and letters at a pivotal point in our history.

Download or read book Looming Civil War written by Jason Phillips and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened? The most anticipated event of the nineteenth century appeared in novels, prophecies, dreams, diaries, speeches, and newspapers decades before the first shots at Fort Sumter. People forecasted a frontier filibuster, an economic clash between free and slave labor, a race war, a revolution, a war for liberation, and Armageddon. Reading their premonitions reveals how several factors, including race, religion, age, gender, region, and class, shaped what people thought about the future and how they imagined it. Some Americans pictured the future as an open, contested era that they progressed toward and molded with their thoughts and actions. Others saw the future as a closed, predetermined world that approached them and sealed their fate. When the war began, these opposing temporalities informed how Americans grasped and waged the conflict. In this creative history, Jason Phillips explains how the expectations of a host of characters-generals, politicians, radicals, citizens, and slaves-affected how people understood the unfolding drama and acted when the future became present. He reconsiders the war's origins without looking at sources using hindsight, that is, without considering what caused the cataclysm and whether it was inevitable. As a result, Phillips dispels a popular myth that all Americans thought the Civil War would be short and glorious at the outset, a ninety-day affair full of fun and adventure. Much more than rational power games played by elites, the war was shaped by uncertainties and emotions and darkened horizons that changed over time. Looming Civil War highlights how individuals approached an ominous future with feelings, thoughts, and perspectives different from our sensibilities and unconnected to our view of their world. Civil War Americans had their own prospects to ponder and forge as they discovered who they were and where life would lead them. The Civil War changed more than America's future; it transformed how Americans imagined the future and how Americans have thought about the future ever since.

Download or read book The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture written by Alice Fahs and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War retains a powerful hold on the American imagination, with each generation since 1865 reassessing its meaning and importance in American life. This volume collects twelve essays by leading Civil War scholars who demonstrate how the meanings of the Civil War have changed over time. The essays move among a variety of cultural and political arenas--from public monuments to parades to political campaigns; from soldiers' memoirs to textbook publishing to children's literature--in order to reveal important changes in how the memory of the Civil War has been employed in American life. Setting the politics of Civil War memory within a wide social and cultural landscape, this volume recovers not only the meanings of the war in various eras, but also the specific processes by which those meanings have been created. By recounting the battles over the memory of the war during the last 140 years, the contributors offer important insights about our identities as individuals and as a nation. Contributors: David W. Blight, Yale University Thomas J. Brown, University of South Carolina Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida Patrick J. Kelly, University of Texas, San Antonio Stuart McConnell, Pitzer College James M. McPherson, Princeton University Joan Waugh, University of California, Los Angeles LeeAnn Whites, University of Missouri Jon Wiener, University of California, Irvine

Download or read book Confederate Visions written by Ian Binnington and published by . This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analyzing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolizing the Confederate nation. Nationalisms tend to construct glorified pasts, idyllic pictures of national strength, honor, and unity, based on visions of what should have been rather than what actually was. Binnington considers the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners employing intertwined mythic concepts--the "Worthy Southron," the "Demon Yankee," the "Silent Slave"--and a sense of shared history that constituted a distinctive Confederate Americanism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest. The creation of American national identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of wartime Confederate nationalism.

Download or read book Ambivalent Nation written by Hugh Dubrulle and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ambivalent Nation, Hugh Dubrulle explores how Britons envisioned the American Civil War and how these conceptions influenced their discussions about race, politics, society, military affairs, and nationalism. Contributing new research that expands upon previous scholarship focused on establishing British public opinion toward the war, Dubrulle offers a methodical dissection of the ideological forces that shaped that opinion, many of which arose from the complex Anglo-American postcolonial relationship. Britain’s lingering feeling of ownership over its former colony contributed heavily to its discussions of the American Civil War. Because Britain continued to have a substantial material interest in the United States, its writers maintained a position of superiority and authority in respect to American affairs. British commentators tended to see the United States as divided by two distinct civilizations, even before the onset of war: a Yankee bourgeois democracy and a southern oligarchy supported by slavery. They invariably articulated mixed feelings toward both sections, and shortly before the Civil War, the expression of these feelings was magnified by the sudden emergence of inexpensive newspapers, periodicals, and books. The conflicted nature of British attitudes toward the United States during the antebellum years anticipates the ambivalence with which the British reacted to the American crisis in 1861. Britons used prewar stereotypes of northerners and southerners to help explain the course and significance of the conflict. Seen in this fashion, the war seemed particularly relevant to a number of questions that occupied British conversations during this period: the characteristics and capacities of people of African descent, the proper role of democracy in society and politics, the future of armed conflict, and the composition of a durable nation. These questions helped shape Britain’s stance toward the war and, in turn, the war informed British attitudes on these subjects. Dubrulle draws from numerous primary sources to explore the rhetoric and beliefs of British public figures during these years, including government papers, manuscripts from press archives, private correspondence, and samplings from a variety of dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies. The first book to examine closely the forces that shaped British public opinion about the Civil War, Ambivalent Nation contextualizes and expands our understanding of British attitudes during this tumultuous period.

Download or read book Battle Hymns written by Christian McWhirter and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music was everywhere during the Civil War. Tunes could be heard ringing out from parlor pianos, thundering at political rallies, and setting the rhythms of military and domestic life. With literacy still limited, music was an important vehicle for communicating ideas about the war, and it had a lasting impact in the decades that followed. Drawing on an array of published and archival sources, Christian McWhirter analyzes the myriad ways music influenced popular culture in the years surrounding the war and discusses its deep resonance for both whites and blacks, South and North. Though published songs of the time have long been catalogued and appreciated, McWhirter is the first to explore what Americans actually said and did with these pieces. By gauging the popularity of the most prominent songs and examining how Americans used them, McWhirter returns music to its central place in American life during the nation's greatest crisis. The result is a portrait of a war fought to music.

Download or read book Kaboom written by Matt Gallagher and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2010-03-23 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Lieutenant Matt Gallagher began his blog with the aim of keeping his family and friends apprised of his experiences, he didn't anticipate that it would resonate far beyond his intended audience. His subjects ranged from mission details to immortality, grim stories about Bon Jovi cassettes mistaken for IEDs, and the daily experiences of the Gravediggers-the code name for members of Gallagher's platoon. When the blog was shut down in June 2008 by the U.S. Army, there were more than twentyfive congressional inquiries regarding the matter as well as reports through the military grapevine that many high-ranking officials and officers at the Pentagon were disappointed that the blog had been ordered closed.Based on Gallagher's extraordinarily popular blog, Kaboom is "at turns hilarious, maddening, and terrifying," providing "raw and insightful snapshots of a conflict many Americans have lost interest in" (Washington Post). Like Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, Gallagher's Kaboom resonates with stoic detachment and timeless insight into a war that we are still trying to understand.