Civil War Dead Research Articles

J. David Hacker’s “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead”

J. David Hacker’s “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead”

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityRemembering World War I in America

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityRemembering World War I in America

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity by Ian Finseth

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity by Ian Finseth

Numbered, Numbered: Commemorating the Civil War Dead in Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper”

At the height of Radical Reconstruction and US Constitutional amendment, when the fates of ex-states and ex-slaves were most insistently joined, Constance Fenimore Woolson set a story of remembrance, a story that turns a sacrificial past into a revolutionary future. First published by the Atlantic Monthly in March 1877, “Rodman the Keeper” has recently been selected by the Norton Anthology of American Literature to demonstrate for growing numbers of students how the opportunities of a tempestuous period were once imaginatively conceived. Because this story will therefore embody Reconstruction’s artistry for years to come, it is important to appreciate its historical nuance as well as its author’s surreptitious choices. Woolson set aside the open violence in Southern states, their occupation by federal troops, and the spread of the Ku Klux Klan as she focused on early 1870, the year when suffrage for African American men was constitutionally ratified. Her story thereby became a selective and widely celebrated gauge of Southern political currents after the war, as white Southerners contemplated bankruptcy and new African American citizens began exercising their rights.

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

The Civil War Dead: Realism and the Problem of Anonymity

The Civil War Dead: Realism and the Problem of Anonymity

A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead

A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead

Grieving American Civil War Dead

Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Civil War general and student of hermetic philosophy, included an interpretation of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess in his 1865 study of early British literature. Rejecting the tradition that equated the poem's characters with John of Gaunt, his deceased wife, Blanche, and his liege servant, Chaucer, Hitchcock instead presents the poem as cloaking Chaucer's heretical ideas on the spiritual world. In making this move, Hitchcock demonstrated how his decade-long interest in alchemy allowed him to read literature anew. In many ways, he was participating in a growing trend toward spiritualism in nineteenth-century America, a movement which gained momentum with the devastation brought by the Civil War. His inability to register the Black Knight's grief as a consequence of the death of a human loved one anticipates not only Reconstruction-era America's fascination with the cult of death, but also twentieth-century academic debates about the best way to read Chaucer's dream visions.

Uncovering Trauma: The Exhumation and Repatriation of Spanish Civil War Dead

Anthropology NewsVolume 51, Issue 3 p. 23-24 Uncovering Trauma: The Exhumation and Repatriation of Spanish Civil War Dead Derek Congram, Derek Congram Canadian forensic bioarchaeologist who has excavated clandestine graves in Canada, Costa Rica, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Spain. His work in Spain has focused on helping families locate kidnapped and murdered relatives, identifying them and documenting trauma prior to their return for proper burial.Search for more papers by this authorAriana Fernández, Ariana Fernández Costa Rican cultural anthropologist. Her research has covered human rights and development issues, primarily in the developing world. She has also participated in forensic work investigating deaths and victim identities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo and Iraq.Search for more papers by this author Derek Congram, Derek Congram Canadian forensic bioarchaeologist who has excavated clandestine graves in Canada, Costa Rica, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Spain. His work in Spain has focused on helping families locate kidnapped and murdered relatives, identifying them and documenting trauma prior to their return for proper burial.Search for more papers by this authorAriana Fernández, Ariana Fernández Costa Rican cultural anthropologist. Her research has covered human rights and development issues, primarily in the developing world. She has also participated in forensic work investigating deaths and victim identities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo and Iraq.Search for more papers by this author First published: 17 March 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3502.2010.51323.xCitations: 6AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume51, Issue3March 2010Pages 23-24 RelatedInformation

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. By John Neff (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2005) 328 pp. $34.95

January 01 2007 Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. By John Neff (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2005) 328 pp. $34.95 Thomas J. Brown Thomas J. Brown Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Thomas J. Brown Online ISSN: 1530-9169 Print ISSN: 0022-1953 © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2006 The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2007) 37 (3): 470–471. https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2007.37.3.470 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Thomas J. Brown; Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. By John Neff (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2005) 328 pp. $34.95. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2007; 37 (3): 470–471. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2007.37.3.470 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

"Numbers on Top of Numbers": Counting the Civil War Dead

The assumption that the government has an obligation to name and count the military dead only emerged in the United States as a result of the Civil War experience. A massive postwar reburial program dedicated to identifying and reinterring every Union soldier was paralleled by intensive public and private efforts accurately to number the war's losses, which had not been carefully compiled by either North or South during the conflict. In an era of increasing preoccupation with statistics, an enumeration of the dead came to seem imperative to understanding the Civil War's unanticipated scale and destructiveness.

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation

It has become commonplace for historians to pronounce the Civil War memory genre as played out. Nothing could be further from the truth, as John R. Neff's Honoring the Civil War Dead demonstrates so well. Neff's cultural study of the profound social consequences of the deaths of 625,000 young men challenges the current scholarly consensus portraying northern compliance with a postwar ideology that emphasized the courage of both sides. In that consensus scenario, loyalty to the Union cause sank while adherence to the Lost Cause rose. As the war's bitterness receded, the Union's righteous ideals, including emancipation, were increasingly elided or downplayed at such venues as Memorial Day ceremonies and battlefield reunions. Neff acknowledges the indisputable fact that reconciliation did take place. Moreover, the victors allowed, and sometimes encouraged, partisans of an utterly defeated slave republic to commemorate and romanticize the Confederacy. “The myth of the Lost Cause,” the author states, “is conspicuous in our national consciousness because it sought to reassert a world that could not be remade if it existed at all” (p. 9). In contrast, the elements of the northern myth, which Neff labels the “cause victorious,” had a solid if unstable basis in reality in the immediate aftermath of war. The cause victorious was anchored by the belief that a stronger, more-united, freer nation emerged from the terrible bloodletting. This new nationalism was sanctified by death and embraced by a majority of northerners and southern freed people.

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation, and: These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory (review)

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation, and: These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory (review)

JOHN R. NEFF. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (ModernWar Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2005. Pp. xiv, 328. $34.95

JOHN R. NEFF. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (ModernWar Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2005. Pp. xiv, 328. $34.95

:Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation.(Modern War Studies.)

:Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation.<i>(Modern War Studies.)</i>

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation

Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation