"Proceedings of the symposium "The Civil War in Art and Memory," organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, and sponsored by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. The symposium was held November 8-9, 2013, in Washington."

Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.

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.

“An important read for anyone trying to sort through the current social and political controversy over the question of how do we memorialize the Civil War.” —Strategy Page Dividing the nation for four years, the American Civil War resulted in 750,000 casualties and forever changed the country’s destiny. The conflict continues to resonate in our collective memory, and U.S. economic, cultural, and social structures still suffer the aftershocks of the nation’s largest and most devastating war. Over a century and a half later, portrayals of the war in books, songs, cinema, and other cultural media continue to draw widespread attention and controversy. In The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning, editors Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. and Randal Allred analyze American depictions of the war across a variety of mediums, from books and film to monuments and battlefield reunions to reenactments and board games. This collection examines how battle strategies, famous generals, and the nuances of Civil War politics translate into contemporary popular culture. This unique analysis assesses the intersection of the Civil War and popular culture by recognizing how memories and commemorations of the war have changed since it ended in 1865.

Kirk Savage explores the National Mall in Washington D.C., site of some of the most important & poignant memorials in the U.S. He shows how the idea of monument has changed over the decades, & how the 19th century concept of the monument has given way to the late 20th century idea of 'space', the monument as an experience.

The Centennial decade was an era of ambivalence, the United States still unresolved about the incomprehensible damage it had wrought over four years of Civil War, and why. Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition -- a spectacular international event celebrating one hundred years of American strength, unity, and freedom -- took place in the immediate wake of this trauma of war and the failures of Reconstruction as a means to restore power and patriotism in the nation’s struggle to rebuild itself. The Unfinished Exhibition, the first comprehensive examination of American art at the Centennial, explains the critical role of visual culture in negotiating memories of the nation’s past that conflicted with the optimism that Exhibition officials promoted. Supporting novel iconographical interpretations with myriad primary source material, author Susanna W. Gold demonstrates how the art galleries and the audiences who visited them addressed the lingering traumas of battle, the uneasy re-unification of North and South, and the persisting racial tensions in the post-Emancipation era. This careful consideration of the visual record exposes the complexities of the war’s impact on Americans and clarifies how the Centennial art exhibition affected a nation still finding its direction at a critical moment in its history.

More than 60,000 books have been published on the Civil War. Most Americans, though, get their ideas about the war--why it was fought, what was won, what was lost--not from books but from movies, television, and other popular media. In an engaging and accessible survey, Gary W. Gallagher guides readers through the stories told in recent film and art, showing how these stories have both reflected and influenced the political, social, and racial currents of their times.