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Buying and Selling Civil War Memory explores the ways in which Guilded Age manufacturers, advertisers, publishers, and others commercialized Civil War memory. Advertisers used images of the war to sell everything from cigarettes to sewing machines; an entire industry grew up around uniforms made for veterans rather than soldiers; publishing houses built subscription bases by tapping into wartime loyalties; while old and young alike found endless sources of entertainment that harkened back to the war. Moving beyond the discussions of how Civil War memory shaped politics and race relations, the essays assembled by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney provide a new framework for examining the intersections of material culture, consumerism, and contested memory in the everyday lives of late-nineteenth century Americans. Each essay offers a case study of a product, experience, or idea related to how the Civil War was remembered and memorialized. Taken together, these essays trace the ways the buying and selling of the Civil War shaped Americans' thinking about the conflict, making an important contribution to scholarship on Civil War memory and extending our understanding of subjects as varied as print, visual, and popular culture; finance; and the histories of education, of the book, and of capitalism in this period. This highly teachable volume presents an exciting intellectual fusion by bringing the subfield of memory studies into conversation with the literature on material culture. The volume's contributors include Amanda Brickell Bellows, Crompton B. Burton, Kevin R. Caprice, Shae Smith Cox, Barbara A. Gannon, Edward John Harcourt, Anna Gibson Holloway, Jonathan S. Jones, Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick, John Neff, Paul Ringel, Natalie Sweet, David K. Thompson, and Jonathan W. White.
About the author
James Marten (Editor) JAMES MARTEN is professor of history at Marquette University and past President of the Society of Civil War Historians. He has written or edited a number of books on the sectional conflict, including
The Children's Civil War (1998);
Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front (2003);
Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (2011);
Children and Youth during the Civil War Era (2012); and
America's Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace (2014).
Caroline E. Janney (Editor) CAROLINE E. JANNEY is John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War and Director of the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. She is a past president of the Society of Civil War Historians and the author or editor of several books including
Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (2008);
Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013); and
Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia (2018).
Summary
Buying and Selling Civil War Memory explores the ways in which Gilded Age manufacturers, advertisers, publishers, and others commercialized Civil War memory.
