Reviewed by: Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America ed. by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney Kelly McMichael Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. Edited by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 274. Notes, index.) Historians James Marten and Caroline E. Janney have compiled fifteen essays that illustrate the ways in which the Civil War was used to reinforce and expand nineteenth-century consumer culture, creating morals and values framed around patriotism and tying these to specific, purchasable objects and experiences. Individuals and corporations commercialized war memories, which proved highly profitable. While the essays in this book focus on the period 1865 to 1900, several hint at the continued commercial success of Civil War memorialization through World War II and, of course, that iconography of the war continues to sell today. The text is divided into three sections. The first section, “Defining Veteranhood,” looks at how individuals sold products, including pharmaceuticals, publications, clothing, and even the warehouse that had been Libby Prison. For example, Shae Smith Cox details how veterans attending reunions wore their “uniforms,” not the ones they had worn during battle but rather new outfits manufactured and marketed to veterans, especially Confederate veterans. Such outfitting of old soldiers was meant to create a coherent identity, but it also provided a ready audience for the mass manufacturing of a clothing line. Section two, “Marketing and Advertising,” includes articles about how marketers used war images of battles and individuals to sell products like cigarettes, stoves, and other household products. Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White argue in their article that the Monitor, the Union ironclad that resonated with buyers who associated the ship with durability, became a “brand” used to sell dozens of different products. The final section, “Imagining the War,” demonstrates how popular images of the war were sold as a means of entertainment. Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick’s article describes how the Milton Bradley Company manufactured a kit called “Myriopticon,” which combined twenty-four images on a hand-cranked roll, viewable through a cutout stage, with a pamphlet to be read that synced to the images. The product was sold as an educational game that featured a narrative not about reconciliation, but rather that southern states needed to industrialize and become capitalist-oriented like the North. Although the fifteen essays included in this book range widely, from highlighting children’s books about teenaged soldiers to discussing Confederate [End Page 130] bonds found in a London vault in 1987, all explore the ways that Gilded Age individuals, advertisers, manufacturers, and publishers both commercialized and racialized the war’s memory, making large profits in the process. Issues of sectionalism and reconciliation are addressed but always in the ways that capitalism overcame such political differences, especially because this consumerism was rooted in Whiteness: reconciliation was made possible not only through an emphasis on the commercial, but also because the consumers were, first and foremost, White. These essays demonstrate the ways that ordinary White Americans bought, sold, and consumed material culture linked to specific Civil War memories, many of which they knew only secondhand through their parents. In addition to the authors mentioned above, the volume includes contributions by Amanda Brickell Bellows, Crompton B. Burton, Kevin R. Caprice, Barbara A. Gannon, Edward John Harcourt, Jonathan S. Jones, John Neff, Paul Ringel, Natalie Sweet, and David K. Thomson. Kelly McMichael American Public University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association
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Sep 5, 2024
José J González Millán + 2
Open Access