Sinha also greatly enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to (1865 to 1877), by covering the end of the nineteenth century—including labor reform movements, the subjugation of Native American tribes in the West, and the rise of American imperialism—into the Progressive era with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Historians have not only underestimated the sheer number of underage soldiers who fought for the Union, they have also overlooked the significance of the legal, political, and administrative battles these youths provoked.

Commemoration, commerce, and complex social connections combined to dictate the paths and diversions of this obscure object and others.

From 1863 onward, Beecher was obsessed with forgiveness. The most influential preacher in the country, he aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates.

Confederates’ quest for bones thus connects to a bizarre history of the use, and misuse, of human remains. Bones from the Bull Run battlefield were taken as acts of domination and displayed as trophies of war. However macabre, human remains became part of the deeply variegated material culture of war.

There is a kind of actor who inhabits his role rather than himself. His true life takes place onstage.

Does the creation of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum suggest that race was irrelevant to nineteenth-century understandings of childhood?

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue
Whether in fact Douglas was a scoundrel
had become the key issue in American politics
in 1858…

In recovering the vibrant presence of Saint Domingue/Haiti in these American moments, both books exemplify the power and promise of adopting an Atlantic lens in telling a national story…each offers a new view onto the familiar landscape of American political development between the Revolution and Reconstruction.

Searching for the prey of an effective censor makes the thrill of discovery especially tantalizing, since the “treasure” is not meant to be found.

“It is worth considering why Americans have invested their flags with such importance and how the United States has become more saturated with patriotic color than any other country in the world. The comparative intensity of American loyalties is less noteworthy than the country’s fixation on a single symbol, which has come to be associated with a remarkably wide range of emotions.”

Thomas Crawford’s “Statue of Freedom”

We are in danger of replicating past commemorations of the Civil War that stressed sectional reconciliation and nation-building at the cost of forgetting the long history of abolitionist activism and the entrenched racial inequalities that abolitionists fought against.

New information on Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who would turn escape into an art form.

Although the film does effectively elicit laughs and outrage, its overall impact is less than the sum of its parts.

Union supporters created an “illusion of collective grief,” a perception that the entire nation—North and South, black and white—was unified in its response to Lincoln’s assassination.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

. . . assemblages of pictures in domestic installations—sometimes described as home altars—allow for the creation of a dream world or alternative visual environment from which the viewer can derive a complex web of meanings.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The anatomical museum was not just a transgressor of public morality, it was a notorious, flagrant transgressor, a public institution devoted to the display of things that should not be displayed.”

Nineteenth-century viewers were just as likely to envision war through the more personalized lens of the family album as through the battlefield.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that […]

Once again abandoned by her husband and afflicted with uncertainty and poverty, Eunice began to direct her own life…

Twain and Wong countered the nativist visions of white masculinity characteristic of popular romance novels featuring historical or foreign settings.

I realized that in order to help my students fully understand how black abolitionists in the North thought about the meaning of the Civil War, I needed to engage some issues that were not raised in Savannah and to explore how other black leaders defined freedom.

The letters and diaries contained an abundance of rich material regarding the effects of shot and shell on the human body.

Jasmine Nichole Cobb views early photography as an especially potent visual technology for the expression of black agency.

By the summer of 1881, news of the recently discovered Luray Caverns in Virginia’s famed Shenandoah Valley had spread throughout […]

Civil War Monuments and the Funerary Sphere In a quiet glade amid the trees and lawns of Boston’s Forest Hills […]

Hinman’s book was about the dirty, miserable, and joyful minutiae of soldier life in the Union army.

In violation of his own rule “ that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others,” Twain’s writings are full of the walking dead.

Classroom Collaborations, Public Engagement and Adventure This past September, the commemorations of the terrorist attacks on New York City and […]

Writing from Washington, where he spent the war years as a devoted hospital visitor or nurse, Whitman deployed his considerable skill as a journalist to introduce readers everywhere to the suffering of the hospitalized soldiers, focusing particularly on syndromes that, he claimed, were not well understood: trauma and its intersection with a wide range of disabilities.

While our own culture shields itself from the prospect of death, our nineteenth-century forebearers embraced it.

Beyond its contribution to Whitman studies and the history of both science and medicine, Tuggle’s book makes a profound contribution at the intersection of Whitman and disability studies.

Gunning Birds         She kept the Yankees from burning her homeby refusing to leave the bed, and when a few […]

What motivated Civil War irregulars?

These documents cover the full range of the American past, from pre-Columbian societies to the present, and represent a wide variety of voices and experiences. Links to more than 600 images, dozens of audio files of speeches, over 150 landmark Supreme Court cases, newspaper articles from the New York Times archives, maps, and a database of annotated links to other collections on the Web are also included.

Death changed America’s relationship with religion and philosophy, but the Civil War fatalities also created a new commodity: the dead.

As “disunion threats materialized into a regional program, and as images of revolution and invasion swirled in the political atmosphere,” Republicans grew increasingly antagonistic towards Southern ultimatums.

  Last Words of the Dying VI Listen! This’llhurt someone! Do not disturbmy circles. You can get morewith a kind […]

One impressive and very useful feature of the site lies in its function as a central clearinghouse for information about the state. In an effort to be comprehensive, the site’s creators are engaged in “assisting institutions across the state in digitizing their records and placing them online for easy access.”

The presence of railroads in the North and South did not determine social relationships in either region. Instead, both sections of the country used the same technology for their own ends.

“Skin and Bones” invites visitors to contemplate what tattoos meant to the sailors who made the decision to use their skin as a canvas.

I loved novels and short stories long before I loved the study of history. As a child, history came to […]

In the antebellum era, well after the fall of the international slave trade, American abolitionists consistently turned to the domestic auction block for propaganda

The ruins of living beings provoked a twinned awe and horror at the transformative power of new technologies.

With my subject so elusive in the archive, material culture offered a compellingly direct link to her world

As Grasso explains in his introduction, Kelso became a “preacher and schoolteacher turned Civil War guerrilla fighter who subsequently became a congressman calling for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, then later a public agnostic, a spiritualist lecturer, and eventually an anarchist.”

What makes Harper’s January 31 [1867] lecture rare is that we have its full text. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph printed a transcription of “National Salvation” the day after Harper spoke.

This photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his son Thomas (Tad) was taken by Anthony Berger in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C. […]

David Shields’s book about Southern foodways contains the seeds of many future conversations.

Lincoln slowly becomes aware […] that a titanic struggle is going on in the background between free humans and vampires.

Slave status, in short, could be reaffixed based on the assumption that a former slave’s “consent” to travel back home reflected an “implied contract” to re-enter slavery.

The American Mediterranean had aspects that white Southerners regarded as foreboding.

Simpson weaves together a scrupulously researched and only lightly imagined twin narrative for his dual protagonists—one black and one white—as they lead lives that touch in profoundly different ways on the great issues of the United States’ first century

“As matters now stand,” he sadly concluded, “there is a United North against a United South, and both marching to the field of blood.”

In Remembering the Civil War, Purdue University historian Caroline Janney challenges the prevailing narrative of Civil War memory, which contends […]

Mark Twain’s Hank Morgan speaks in Lucy Biederman’s poetry.

Enacting Nat Fuller’s Feast at the University of South Carolina

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s bloody fourth year, it is perhaps appropriate to ask: […]

The descendant of Nat Fuller’s mentor reflects on the 2015 Feast.

A Cultural Historian’s View of Civil War Memorials at Appomattox, Fredericksburg, and Island Mound When I go to the battlefields, […]

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings  When we […]

As the preceding slides suggests, Confederate songsters did not shy away from “foreign” material. For instance, “Mary of Argyle” is […]

How can acts of periodization produce historical frameworks commensurate to the vast trauma and shock of the Civil War?

An open letter from Chef Kevin Mitchell to Chef Nat Fuller.

Kentucky’s Belated Embrace of Abraham Lincoln Earlier this year, Skyler Hornback, a 12-year-old from Sonora, Kentucky, racked up $66,600 on […]

Domestic Violation, Women, and Remembrance in Missouri’s Guerrilla Theater The sound of gunfire cracked the morning silence. News that another […]

How does one create memory around an event that has long been lost to history?

The Civil War was one great eruption of something immanent in human civilization: an ineradicable cycle of violence, a timeless struggle for democracy and freedom.

By the time the Union army reached Bayou Boeuf—the neighborhood where Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped from upstate […]

Remembering Sand Creek, Rethinking the Civil War The runners were exhausted. Mostly young people from the Northern and Southern Cheyenne […]

  It’s rare for a single work of scholarship to fundamentally change the way I teach a topic in U.S. […]

A twenty-first century chef invites guests to enter the spirit of Nat Fuller’s 1865 Reconciliation Banquet.

Two inches wide and eleven feet long, it mapped, among other things, a reunited nation.

Currier and Ives never intended to produce prints of great value. They sold their products for as little as fifteen cents and no more than three dollars. Rather than aspiring to have their work exhibited in the nation’s fine-art museums and galleries, they sought to have it hung on the walls of America’s homes, stores, barbershops, firehouses, barrooms, and barns.

To ask whether a revolution is a civil war narrows the topic considerably, forcing us to focus on the war itself, the violent and more troubling part of the story.

The questions and subjects that bring professional historians together at academic conferences deserve to be discussed in wider circles.

What happens if we pair “post” and “transbellum”?

McIntosh championed the soprano-led ensemble, softer singing style, proper enunciation, and a more affected style of performance characteristic of both liturgical-based denominations such as Episcopalians, Catholics, and Lutherans, as well as members of polite society.

This is the Abraham Lincoln of America’s monuments.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Photographs did eventually replace wood engravings in illustration, but before that photography joined and transformed wood engraving so as to favor its claims as a fine art.

David Shields reflects on the legacy of Nat Fuller in the wake of the attack on the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“How do we then account for the transition from curios to antiques? Why was the change in nomenclature and character so rapid?”

Digital History and Civil War Commemoration I saw Emilie Davis’s diaries years ago—three leather-bound volumes, small enough to fit comfortably […]

Los Angeles mirrored itself—magical and ordinary, artificial and real, blessed and damned—a dialectic of promotion that suited this prototypical culture industry, invoking truth and falsity…

Whether or not the two men actually had conversational exchanges, there is no disputing the commonality of their experience.

The Sesquicentennial, the National Park Service, and a Changing Nation It’s a great irony of our history: the places of […]

“[I]f Joss Whedon, spy in the house of love, isn’t willing or able to wrestle with the legacy of slavery, who is?”

As Marrs makes clear, the career plot of transbellum authors reveals how periodization has distorted what we could know about the works of writers stranded for too long on one side of the Civil War divide.

An invitation to Common-place readers to create their own events dedicated to reconciliation.

“Alongside horses and sheep, captives moved throughout the borderlands economies.”

Clinton, South Carolina, seems at first blush an unlikely host location for the Nat Fuller Feast.

The making of Civil War memory did not begin only after the war ended. Americans began shaping their memories of […]

Starting in the dining room, I stared blankly at the large gold-framed portrait of a young woman. Although I had walked past her a hundred times, I had never stopped to ask, “Who is she, the woman with knotted braids gracing her rose-tinted cheeks?”

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

“Late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mug books are collections of biographical sketches, a curiously rich source for genealogists and historians alike.”

“If the many questions directed to a New York City history Website I co-supervise are any indication—including a certain befuddlement by visitors when they fail to locate information about events wholly invented in the film—audiences believe its story.”

“If, as Jennings argued, Parkman offers bad history, then why plow through thousands of pages of the stuff?”

“That Democrats were an impetus behind the [antislavery] amendment is one of the surprises of Vorenberg’s narrative…”

“Memory is often owned, history interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised.”

“[The Journal of Henri Joutel] doesn’t fit into Anglo-American heroic origins, like Lewis and Clark’s journals, and it hasn’t enjoyed a revival as Chicano literature the way Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios has. Yet as exploration narrative it’s much better than the former and every bit as good as the latter.”

“[S]erving in a patrol may have reaffirmed Southern notions of community, kinship, masculinity, and honor.”

A generation away from the Sans Souci, we try to talk about what we see at museums, historic sites, and monuments.

Common-Place asks scholar-writer Richard Slotkin, author of such classics of American cultural history as Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, Gunfighter Nation, and, most recently, of Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln: “What can you do as a novelist that you can’t as an historian–and vice versa?

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