What can consumerism and material culture teach us about how ordinary Americans remembered their Civil War?
Buying and Selling Civil War Memory explores ways in which Americans remembered the war in their everyday lives. There was an entire industry of Civil War memory that emerged in the Gilded Age. Civil War generals appeared in advertising; uniforms continued to be manufactured and sold long after the war ended; and in many other ways the iconography of the war was used to market products. What, then, can this tell us about the way Americans remembered their war in the most quotidian ways? The editors, James Marten and Caroline E. Janney, have assembled a collection of essays that provide a new framework for examining the intersections of material culture, consumerism, and contested memory.
Each essay offers a case study of a product, experience, or idea related to how the Civil War was remembered and memorialized. Taken together, these essays trace the ways the buying and selling of the Civil War shaped Americans’ thinking about the conflict, making an important contribution to scholarship on Civil War memory and extending our understanding of subjects as varied as print culture, visual culture, popular culture, finance, the history of education, the history of the book, and the history of capitalism in this period. This highly teachable volume advances the subfield of memory studies and brings it into conversation with the literature on material culture—an exciting intellectual fusion.
The volume’s contributors include Amanda Brickell Bellows, Crompton B. Burton, Kevin R. Caprice, Shae Cox, Barbara A. Gannon, Edward John Harcourt, Anna Gibson Holloway, Jonathan S. Jones, Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick, John Neff, Paul Ringel, Natalie Sweet, David K. Thompson, and Jonathan W. White.
Author Biography:
James Marten is professor of history at Marquette University and past President of the Society of Civil War Historians. He has written or edited a number of books on the sectional conflict, including The Children's Civil War (1998); Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front (2003); Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (2011); Children and Youth during the Civil War Era (2012); and America's Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace (2014).
Caroline E. Janney is John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War and Director of the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. She is a past president of the Society of Civil War Historians and the author or editor of several books including Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (2008); Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013); and Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia (2018).
Amanda Brickell Bellows is Project Historian at the New York Public Library. A 2016 PhD from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, she has published several articles on post-emancipation representations of serfs, peasants, slaves, and freedpeople in Russian and American National Art, in journals including the New Literary Observer/Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie and the Journal of Global Slavery.
Crompton Burton is an Internal Communications Manager in the Office of Human Resources for the University of Maine System, Augusta, Maine. Before arriving in Maine, he worked in other university administrations and spent time as a TV producer and broadcast news coordinator. He has a Master of Science in Journalism from Ohio University. He has published numerous articles about Civil War topics in publications including Surgeon's Call: Journal of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine and Maine History.
Kevin Caprice is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Virginia. His dissertation explores the opportunities of the Republican majority allowed by the vacated congressional seats of secessionists, and the after-effects of Republican aspirations for the growing United States.
Shae Cox recently earned her Ph.D. in History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is revising her dissertation "The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1861-1939" for publication.
Barbara A. Gannon is Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of Americans Remember their Civil War (Praeger, 2017) and The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), which won the Wiley-Silver Prize in Civil War History.
Edward J. Harcourt Edward John Harcourt is a Senior Vice President & Managing Director at Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Ltd., a higher education services company serving over 1400 universities worldwide. Previously, he was Pro-Vice-Chancellor at John Moores University in Liverpool, England. He gained a PhD in American history from Vanderbilt University and has previously published essays on the American Civil War in the Journal of Social History, Southern Cultures and Civil War History.
Anna Gibson Holloway is Museum Services Director at SEARCH. A maritime historian, she has nearly thirty years of experience with maritime art and material culture, museum collections management, curation, education, and interpretation. With a PhD in history from the College of William & Mary, she has served as a historian for the National Park Service as well as curator and Vice President of Collections and Programs at the Marines' Museum in Newport News, Virginia, where she led the effort to create the 20,000 square foot, award-winning USS Monitor Center exhibition.
