Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America - (Uncivil Wars) by James Marten & Caroline E Janney (Paperback)

About the Book

"Buying and Selling the Civil War is a collection of original essays about the marketing and selling of Civil War memory during the postwar economic boom known as the "Gilded Age." The editors, Marten and Janney, both renowned scholars for their studies of the Civil War, provide a new framework for examining the intersections of material culture, consumerism, and contested memory. Each essay offers a case study of a product, experience, or idea related to how the Civil War is remembered and memorialized. Taken together, these essays trace the ways the buying and selling of the Civil War shaped Americans' thinking about the conflict. As one reviewer points out, this volume makes an "important contribution to scholarship on Civil War memory" and extends our understanding of subjects as varied as "print culture, visual culture, popular culture, finance, the history of education, the history of the book, and the history of capitalism in this period." The volume's contributors include Crompton B. Burton, Kevin R. Caprice, Shae Cox, Jonathan S. Jones, David K. Thompson, Amanda Brickell Bellows, Natalie Sweet, Jonathan W. White, Anna Gibson Holloway, Barbara A. Gannon, Edward John Harcourt, Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick, Paul Ringel, and John Neff"--

Book Synopsis

Buying and Selling Civil War Memory explores the ways in which Gilded 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. Thomson, and Jonathan W. White.

Review Quotes

Buying and Selling Civil War Memory represents an important contribution to the literature by showing how Americans filtered Civil War memory through consumer culture. The essays in this volume prompt readers to think more about the mediums through which Americans received stories about the conflict...Overall, the book's entertaining and thought-provoking stories make it an excellent choice for undergraduate or graduate classrooms.--Joshua Lee Waddell "H-Net Reviews"

Individually, the book's fifteen chapters are interesting and make important points about how we remember our national bloodletting. Taken together, though, they simultaneously illuminate how the war really did engross virtually every facet of American life for decades after Appomattox.--Matthew Christopher Hulbert "The North Carolina Historical Review"

This intriguing volume reveals how the words and images of war became a 'common currency' that shaped advertising campaigns, imparted new meaning to mundane objects, and shaped the professionalization of marketing and business during an era of unprecedented economic growth.--Matthew E. Stanley "The Journal of Southern History"

Assembling essays from seasoned scholars and early career historians alike, this well-conceived volume demonstrates the yet untapped potential of memory studies to reveal new insights about the Civil War's long shadow. Borrowing approaches from material culture studies and histories of consumer culture, Buying & Selling Civil War Memory reveals how the war, in ways big and small, continued to annex ordinary lives at century's end.

--Brian Matthew Jordan "The Civil War Monitor"