American War and Memory: Civil War Through World War I

2020

Shannon Bontrager has written an intricate, impressive book about mourning, memory, and national identity. Some facets of his story are familiar, but he extends the sweep of his analysis in fresh and provocative directions, enlarging it, as the title suggests, to the edges of the American empire. At the core of the book is the evolution of the commemoration of the fallen

The Journal of Military History, 2009

Anthropos, 2022

The outburst of antiracist protests in the USA in 2020 demonstrates how deeply this society’s present-day problems are rooted in its past. From this perspective, a study of the cultural memory of the time of the Civil War and abolishing of slavery, the key moment in the contemporary American nation formation, is especially relevant and important. The cultural frontier between the US North and the South that had appeared as an outcome of differences in their history has not disappeared up to now. By the example of complexity and inconsistency of the historical memory of the Civil War, slavery, and its abolition in the USA manifested in their visual representations, the article documents how through the collective memory, history does not just invade modernity but is present in it, particularly in the form of memorials, monuments, museum expositions, and therefore determines the nation’s modernity to a large degree.

Journal of Southern History, 2018

aspeers: emerging voices in american studies

Biography, 2003

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.

2019

Supplemental material, Yamashiro_supplementary_file for American origins: Political and religious divides in US collective memory by Jeremy K Yamashiro, Abram Van Engen and Henry L Roediger in Memory Studies

Reviews in American History, 2018

How are the Civil War and Reconstruction represented, and for what purposes? These are central questions that two recent texts ask and answer by revisiting and even combing through the ways these events are represented in literature. Additionally, Timothy Sweet and Brook Thomas expand our ideas of what literary cultures and Reconstruction literature are by incorporating epistolary, visual, and even musical print and oral culture. Literary Cultures of the Civil War (2016), edited by Timothy Sweet, uses the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, when, Sweet argues, "literary historian Fred Lewis Pattee proclaimed a new definition of American literature," as a beginning framework to return to the "first really national period" that originated after the close of the war (p. 2; p. 1). Sweet revisits Pattee to discuss American writers' declaration of literary independence from European tradition and the absence of discussions of literature of that period in more contemporary critical analysis (p. 1). Additionally, Sweet points out omissions of African American writers. Thus, Sweet's collection claims to "[return] to the unsettled moment when the memory of the war was not yet overwritten by topoi that would later come to dominate, such as the Lost Cause, the romance of reunion, and the reconciliation of veterans" (p. 2). The collection delivers on this promise, using studies of oral culture, manuscript journals and letters, newspapers, magazines, and books produced before the end of Reconstruction to explore what Sweet calls "the ground of alternative memories" from the beginning of canon formation through the sesquicentennial (p. 2).

Critical Quarterly, 2014