The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity PDF

Author: Ian Finseth

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190848340

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The "ghastly spectacle": witnessing Civil War death -- Body images: the Civil War dead in visual culture -- Blood and ink: historicizing the Civil War dead -- Plotting mortality: the Civil War dead and the narrative imagination

Remembering World War I in America

Remembering World War I in America PDF

Author: Kimberly J. Lamay Licursi

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0803290853

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

State war histories: an atom of interest in an ocean of apathy -- War memoirs: they pour from the presses daily -- War stories: fiction cannot ignore the greatest adventure in a man's life -- War films: shootin' and kissin'

This Republic of Suffering

This Republic of Suffering PDF

Author: Drew Gilpin Faust

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-01-06

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0375703837

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Death at the Edges of Empire

Death at the Edges of Empire PDF

Author: Shannon Bontrager

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-02

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1496219090

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.

The Civil War and the limits of destruction

The Civil War and the limits of destruction PDF

Author: Mark E Neely

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0674041364

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Civil War is often portrayed as the most brutal war in America's history, a premonition of twentieth-century slaughter and carnage. In challenging this view, Mark E. Neely, Jr., considers the war's destructiveness in a comparative context, revealing the sense of limits that guided the conduct of American soldiers and statesmen. Neely begins by contrasting Civil War behavior with U.S. soldiers' experiences in the Mexican War of 1846. He examines Price's Raid in Missouri for evidence of deterioration in the restraints imposed by the customs of war; and in a brilliant analysis of Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign, he shows that the actions of U.S. cavalrymen were selective and controlled. The Mexican war of the 1860s between French imperial forces and republicans provided a new yardstick for brutality: Emperor Maximilian's infamous Black Decree threatened captured enemies with execution. Civil War battles, however, paled in comparison with the unrestrained warfare waged against the Plains Indians. Racial beliefs, Neely shows, were a major determinant of wartime behavior. Destructive rhetoric was rampant in the congressional debate over the resolution to avenge the treatment of Union captives at Andersonville by deliberately starving and freezing to death Confederate prisoners of war. Nevertheless, to gauge the events of the war by the ferocity of its language of political hatred is a mistake, Neely argues. The modern overemphasis on violence in Civil War literature has led many scholars to go too far in drawing close analogies with the twentieth century's total war and the grim guerrilla struggles of Vietnam.

America Goes to War

America Goes to War PDF

Author: Bruce Catton

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 1958

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780819560162

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A fascinating study of the first modern war and its effect on American Culture.

A Short History of the American Civil War

A Short History of the American Civil War PDF

Author: Paul Christopher Anderson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-12-26

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 178672667X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The American Civil War (1861-65) remains a searing event in the collective consciousness of the United States. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history, claiming the lives of at least 600,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians and slaves. The Civil War was also one of the world's first truly industrial conflicts, involving railroads, the telegraph, steamships and mass-manufactured weaponry. The eventual victory of the Union over the Confederacy rang the death-knell for American slavery, and set the USA on the path to becoming a truly world power. Paul Christopher Anderson shows how and why the conflict remains the nation's defining moment, arguing that it was above all a struggle for power and political supremacy but was also a struggle for the idea of America. Melding social, cultural and military history, the author explores iconic battles like Shiloh, Chickamauga, Antietam and Gettysburg, as well as the bitterly contesting forces underlying them and the myth-making that came to define them in aftermath. He shows that while both sides began the war in order to preserve - the integrity of the American state in the case of the Union, the integrity of a culture, a value system, and as slave society in the case of the Confederacy - it allowed the American South to define a regional identity that has survived into modern times.

Civil War Canon

Civil War Canon PDF

Author: Thomas J. Brown

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1469620960

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this expansive history of South Carolina's commemoration of the Civil War era, Thomas J. Brown uses the lens of place to examine the ways that landmarks of Confederate memory have helped white southerners negotiate their shifting political, social, and economic positions. By looking at prominent sites such as Fort Sumter, Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery, and the South Carolina statehouse, Brown reveals a dynamic pattern of contestation and change. He highlights transformations of gender norms and establishes a fresh perspective on race in Civil War remembrance by emphasizing the fluidity of racial identity within the politics of white supremacy. Despite the conservative ideology that connects these sites, Brown argues that the Confederate canon of memory has adapted to address varied challenges of modernity from the war's end to the present, when enthusiasts turn to fantasy to renew a faded myth while children of the civil rights era look for a usable Confederate past. In surveying a rich, controversial, and sometimes even comical cultural landscape, Brown illuminates the workings of collective memory sustained by engagement with the particularity of place.

Civil War America

Civil War America PDF

Author: Robert Cook

Publisher: Pascal Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 866

ISBN-13: 9780582381070

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Focusing on the period 1848 to 1877 this important social history describes the experiences of ordinary people on the battlefield and beyond, and reveals how the American Civil War paved the way for U.S. great power status and why the U.S.A. rules the world today.