The Civil War in 50 Objects by Harold Holzer and the New-York Historical Society (original) (raw)
2021
This thesis addresses the use of a set of photographs of returned prisoners of war (POWs) published both as tipped-in albumen prints and as wood engravings in six different publications from 1864 and 1865, including three versions of Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War in the Hands of the rebel Authorities, one pamphlet, and two magazine articles, The discussion focuses on the dissemination of these images by the United States Sanitary Commission, the ways in which the photographs were presented in the individual publications that contained them, the decisions that the engravers made in translating the photographs into wood engravings and the visual codes that informed the photographs and the related engravings. The illustrated essay situates these photographs and wood engravings within the political context of the American Civil War and the history of photography in the 1860s. The dissemination of photographic imagery...
War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era
2018
The Civil War remains a pivotal event in southern history, with many themes resurfacing throughout its long academic life. Yet, one area that Civil War historians tend to ignore is material culture, which could open an entirely new vein of interpretation while also underscoring the intersections between race, class, and gender on the battlefield and home front. War Matters offers a refreshing analysis of the economic, social, political, and cultural nuances of the Civil War era through the use of material culture. Editor Joan E. Cashin and her fellow contributors focus on objects as small as pocketbook bibles and as vast as battlefields in order to deepen our understanding of the ongoing debates in the field and to familiarize us with newer themes.
Slaves, Soldiers, Citizens: African American Artifacts of the Civil War Era
2014
Lauren H. Roedner '13, Gettysburg College Angelo Scarlato Scott Hancock, Gettysburg College Jordan G. Cinderich '15, Gettysburg College Tricia M. Runzel '13, Gettysburg College Avery C. Lentz '14, Gettysburg College Brian D. Johnson '14, Gettysburg College Lincoln M. Fitch '14, Gettysburg College Michele B. Seabrook '13, Gettysburg College Follow this and additional works at: http://cupola.gettysburg.edu/libexhibits
Art, Artifact, Archive: African American Experiences in the Nineteenth Century
2015
Angelo Scarlato's extraordinary and vast collection of art and artifacts related to the Civil War, and specifically to the Battle of Gettysburg, the United States Colored Troops, slavery and the African American struggle for emancipation, citizenship and freedom has proved to be an extraordinary resource for Gettysburg College students. The 2012-14 exhibition in Musselman Library's Special Collections, curated by Lauren Roedner '13, entitled Slaves, Soldiers, Citizens: African American Artifacts of the Civil War Era and its corresponding catalogue provided a powerful and comprehensive historical narrative of the period.
Proceedings of the MId-America Conference on History, 2012, 2012
This study explores the newspaper illustrations associated with the Civil War Battle of Wilson’s Creek which took place near Springfield, Missouri. Within three weeks of this August 10, 1861, encounter, five published images of the battle appeared in the widely circulated, New York-based newspapers, Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Like most illustrations in Civil War papers, these early depictions of the Battle of Wilson’s Creek are understudied. Scholars have yet to address these images as imaginative constructions with roots in the Western visual tradition. Understanding these roots and their iconographic implications provides important insights into the cultural and social history of the Civil War era. The text examines the illustrators’ allusions to earlier heroic and religious images encouraged audiences to see General Nathaniel Lyon (the first Union general to die in the Civil War) as a martyr to the federal cause. Four of the five aforementioned images portray Lyon’s fatal charge, his fall, or his battlefield death. Elements such as Lyon’s hat and his horse became powerful signifiers that reinforced the heroic narrative that was constructed for the general in the Union press. When one learns to “read” these images, it becomes clear that they are subjective inventions that advance an emphatically Northern viewpoint. Without an illustrated paper in 1861, the South had no organ to advance a pro-Southern vision of the Wilson’s Creek battle. Subsequently, the visual traditions begun by the Northern papers continued throughout the nineteenth century.
The archive lies at the center of our work as historians. We spend months and years in its reading rooms, looking for elusive facts, arcane documents, and obscure stories. The archive defines and differentiates us from fellow humanists, gives credence to our claims for knowledge, and enshrouds our narratives with an aura of truth. Both real and ro-manticized, it is our place of labor and also an emblem of our craft. Yet how often do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the archives we work in? When have we last probed our source material, attempted to investigate the circumstances that brought it into our possession, or examined the structures underlying the collections we use? While influential books such as Bonnie Smith's The Gender of History and W. Fitzhugh Brundage's The Southern Past have investigated the meaning of archival work in particular contexts, historians of the United States tend to look through archives, but rarely at them. 1 This lacuna is particularly glaring considering the predominance of the " archival turn " in other fields of the humanities. Since the 1970s, scholars in a range of disciplines have grown acutely aware of the archive's artificial and constructed nature and of the myriad ways it is shaped by social, political, and cultural forces. As the archival theorists Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook note, " archives have their origins in the information needs and social values of the rulers, governments, businesses, and individuals who establish and maintain them. Archives then are not some pristine storehouse of historical documentation that has piled up, but a reflection of and often justification for the society that creates them. " Moreover, scholarship on archives has also stressed the dialectical relationship between the archive's reflective and constitutive elements. Francis X. Blouin and Charles Rosenberg have summarized this postmodern argument: " the archive itself is not simply a reflection or an image of an event but also shapes the event, the phenomena of its origins. Yael A. Sternhell is an assistant professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University. She is deeply indebted to Daniel Rodgers, Gaines Foster, John Coski, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, and the reviewers and editors at the Journal of Ameri-can History for commenting extensively on earlier drafts of this article. Audiences and commentators at Princeton University , Boston University, Tel Aviv University, and at conferences of
Humanities 13: 153. https://doi.org/10.3390/ h13060153, 2024
The American Civil War has been commemorated with a great variety of monuments, memorials, and markers. These monuments were erected for a variety of reasons, beginning with memorialization of the fallen and later to honor aging veterans, commemoration of significant anniversaries associated with the conflict, memorialization of sites of conflict, and celebration of the actions of military leaders. Sources reveal that during both the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, many monuments were erected as part of an organized propaganda campaign to terrorize African American communities and distort the past by promoting a “Lost Cause” narrative. Through subsequent decades, to this day, complex and emotional narratives have surrounded interpretive legacies of the Civil War. Instruments of commemoration, through both physical and digital intervention approaches, can be provocative and instructive, as the country deals with a slavery legacy and the commemorated objects and spaces surrounding Confederate inheritances. Today, all of these potential factors and outcomes, with internationally relevance, are surrounded by swirls of social and political contention and controversy, including the remembering/forgetting dichotomies of cultural heritage. In this article, drawing from the testimony of scholars and artists, I address the conceptual landscape of approaches to the presentation and evolving participatory narratives of Confederate monuments that range from absolute expungement and removal to more restrained ideas such as in situ re-contextualization, removal to museums, and preservation-in-place. I stress not so much the academic debate but how the American public is informed about and reacts to the various issues related to Confederate memorialization. My main point, where my premise stands out in the literature, is that, for the sake of posterity, and our ability to connect and engage with a tangible in situ artifact, not all Confederate statues should be taken down. Some of them, or remnants of them, should be preserved as sites of conscience and reflection, with their social and political meanings ongoing and yet to be determined in the future. The modern dilemma turns on the question: In today’s new era of social justice, are these monuments primarily symbols of oppression, or can we see them, in select cases, alternatively as sites of conscience and reflection encompassing more inclusive conversations about commemoration? What we conserve and assign as the ultimate public value of these monuments rests with how we answer this question.
Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?
History and Theory, 2002
The Civil War generated hundreds of history paintings. Yet, as this essay argues, painters failed to create any iconic, lasting images of the Civil War using the conventions of grand manner history painting, despite the expectations of many that they would and should. This essay first examines the terms by which I am evaluating this failure, then moves on to a consideration of the American history painting tradition. I next examine several history paintings of Civil War scenes in light of this tradition and argue that their “failure” to capture the meaning and essence of the war resulted from a breakdown of the narrative conventions of history painting. Finally, I glance briefly at Winslow Homer’s Civil War scenes, arguably the only ones which have become canonical, and suggest that the success of these images comes from their abandonment of old conventions and the invention of new ones.