The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

IN_BO, Ricerche e progetti per il territorio, la città e l’architettura, v.8, n.12 (ISSN 2036 1602), 2017

Civil War memorials in the United States represent the difficult national memory of a still contested internecine war over slavery, social equity, and public values. Today there is a heated debate about physical monuments honoring Confederate leaders and soldiers. For many, the original social memory has disappeared and meanings attributed to them have shifted from association with war dead, or the cult of the "lost cause," to symbols of slavery and white supremacy. Their forms are open to new interpretations connected to human subjectivity and situatedness. Do these confederate memorials glorify racism or absorb the historical memory of grief? This essay examines the ongoing Confederate war memorial debate as evidence of the powerful role of monuments in the city and their ever changing meaning.

Critical Quarterly, 2014

2015

Chapter from Book Exploring Lincoln: Great Historians Reappraise Our Greatest President, edited by Harold Holzer, Craig L. Symonds, Frank J. Williams, Fordham University Press.

The Journal of Military History, 2006

Prospects, 2000

With P. T. Barnum's purchase of the American museum in 1840, freak shows became an organized and profitable institution that systematically used juxtaposition, innovative advertising, and questions of truth and humbug to entice audiences. Along with “scientifically” sanctioned pamphlets and cartes de visite, exhibits such as wild savages from around the world, human-animal hybrids, hermaphrodites, and armless and legless wonders played with the boundaries between self and other. Audiences could gaze safely without compunction about the displayed body as long as these distinctions were maintained within the confines of the show. But as social anxieties about difference intensified in the first few decades of the 20th century, a greater need to solidify the boundaries between black and white, male and female, and abled and disabled made this type of entertainment more disturbing and, at times, even dangerous. These concerns marked the beginning of the end for freak shows. By the 1...

Invisible Culture, 2003

International Journal of Military History and Historiography, 2018

The overseas American war cemeteries, in their aim to achieve "soft power" or cultural diplomacy during the mid-century, created high-value commissions in the American art world. The sought-after commissions resulted in an internal struggle between artists practicing traditional figural Classicism and the avant-garde who had adopted expressionism and abstraction. Additionally, a surging political stream of anti-Communism made artists vulnerable, because modern art seemed to underscore Communism's abandonment of religion. By adopting demagoguery as political strategy, McCarthyists escalated the perception of Communism as present in the United States by targeting American culture, including artists of the American war cemeteries. Describing the struggles surrounding the creation of the cemeteries, this essay takes into account the artists' biographies, statements, and actions, arguing that their art-making was not only critical in creating international diplomacy, but also in sustaining American freedom, particularly within an era of American political suspicion.

The Journal of Military History, 2009

History of Photography, 2021

This article explores the circulation of photographs of prisoners of war that were taken at the US General Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland in 1864. More specifically, it considers the publication of these images as wood engravings in Harper’s Weekly’s illustrated newspaper as part of a broader network of photographic circulation, and the circulation of images of atrocity during the American Civil War. This project follows recent interventions in photographic history that have emphasised reproduction and circulation, and that have decentred the photographic print as the primary site for the production of meaning. By examining the multiple visual and narrative contexts in which photographs of the Annapolis prisoners appeared, including as wood engravings in Harper’s Weekly, this article reveals how divergent meanings were ascribed to the images, as both the press and the public sought to make sense of the prisoners’ deterioration and to use their images for political purposes. Ultimately, the article employs circulation as a methodology to understand how audiences used photographs to make sense of the seemingly ineffable trauma and devastation of the American Civil War. This project also demonstrates how Harper’s Weekly relied upon an existing public archive – of text and images, particularly cartes de visite – to report the news and to further its rhetorical position. It is important to highlight that the images in this article are disturbing. They show men in states of significant emaciation and were presumably taken without full consent. These pictures are shown as part of an effort to understand the ways in which images of atrocity were circulated in the nineteenth century, and, as such, requires that we consider the appropriateness of publishing and exhibiting such images both then and now. A question of care and of an ethics of looking must be at the forefront of this critical engagement.