Civil War Literature and the News

Abstract

In the 1987 preface to a new edition of The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), Daniel Aaron reflects on the “still elusive, still unfolding” nature of his subject. Given how “pliable historical and literary ‘evidence’ can be,” he concludes, “new writing about the Civil War era” illustrates, even more than with other historical inquiries, how the “shocks and disorders” of critics’ own times influence the versions of the past they present to their readers (xvi). One way we might understand Aaron’s point is as a more or less humdrum truism: that, whether or not historians embrace modes of presentism in their scholarship, current events will revivify topics that previous generations have left unexplored. However, when Aaron elaborates that the Civil War “remains … a live volcano, a Rorschach test often more revelatory of the perceiver than what is being perceived,” he suggests that there’s something exceptionally pressing about Civil War history. Studying the Civil War in particular, he intimates, turns us into what Jeffrey Insko, in his study of abolitionist historiography, terms “Romantic presentists,” hailing us into a vision of “history as an always-unfinished activity happening now and remaking—as opposed to trying to know—then” (5, 6).