Wet Dreams, Dirty Pictures, and the Ragged Heart of the Civil War Mark Smith (bio) Judith Giesberg. Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xiii + 135 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Jonathan W. White. Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xxiv + 265 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. A year before the Civil War ended, Lt. John Foster of the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers had a wet dream. In letters to his wife, he confessed it was sufficiently vivid that he'd soiled his shirt; he then encouraged her to masturbate by their fireplace in his absence. What, precisely, inspired Lt. Foster's dream we do not know. Perhaps it was the result of war-induced absence of sexual intimacy. Or, perhaps, Foster and others who experienced these "nocturnal emissions, foul dreams, etc.," as a chaplain for the 145th Pennsylvania Volunteers styled them, had been exposed to the widely available erotic images and spicy stories, which soldiers on the march and in camp apparently devoured with keen appetite (White, p. 34). If the latter, then it is in the intimate dreams of Lt. Foster that the two books under review here meet: one by Judith Giesberg about pornography during the war, the other concerning war-time dreams and sleep by Jonathan W. White. Whatever happened to the Civil War where soldiers marched and fought, officers directed and failed and gloried, and students indelibly committed every movement, battle, and engagement to storied memory? The answer, up until quite recently, is, simply, not much. To be sure, the intervention of social historians in the field beginning in the 1990s offered a transition of sorts, one ostensibly written against the predominantly military history of the war. We were politely ushered from the generals and the decisive battles to the common soldiers and the interesting skirmishes, escorted from the fields of glory to humble home fronts, themselves essential to determining the outcome of the war. New narratives and some terribly important [End Page 445] interpretations emerged as a result of this shift, chief among them the idea that the enslaved freed themselves. And yet, as Drew Gilpin Faust and others have noted, these new social histories barely grazed the interpretive thrust of the conventional understanding of the war. The war was still an abiding moment of truth, offering something digestible to historians of all stripes, social and military.1 The war still lacked ambivalence, was still held together by a narrative, bookended thread, and still had a holistic quality. The war was hard but noble, a thoroughly American and, indeed, even human experience, replete with transcendent qualities, ones so enduring and seemingly impervious to reinterpretation that in 1999 a frustrated Ed Ayers averred that we still needed a real sense of the war's depth and texture.2 Enter the "new revisionist" historians who, within the past decade, have tried to answer Ayers's call. As Stephen Berry explained in his superb and genuinely path breaking edited collection of essays, Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges: "What caused the war? Who gets credit for victory or defeat? Who freed the slaves? How did the war condense us as a people? These are tired questions; their assumptions box us in." To unbox us, Berry and his authors invited us to listen to new voices and actors: from "soldiers who looted bodies and joyfully blew things up; from men who guiltlessly made money making war; from madams who trafficked in the war's wake; and from African American troops who decided desertion was the better part of valor" (p. 3). Are these new voices representative of the experience and meaning of the war? No, said Berry; but that's the point: they leave us with a fragmented, episodic, crooked view of the war, one that can be revealing in its "weirdness." These are the "ragged" edges of the war, edges that decenter the war and take us to revealing peripheries. At first blush, the two books under review...