The shadow of the civil war: A historiography of civil war memory

The memory of the Civil War has become one of the most vibrant and contested subjects in nineteenth-century American history over the past two decades. Studies of Civil War memory potentially can reveal much about the cultural, political, and intellectual world of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Whereas the Civil War has often been studied in historical isolation, histories of memory thrust off the standard constraints of periodization to emphatically link the Civil War with late nineteenthcentury history. David W Blight's award-winning synthesis Race and Reunion (2001) both indicates the topic's rapid maturation and heightens the need for a historiographical excursion to assess the collective strengths and weaknesses of this burgeoning subfield. The following essay explores the convergence of factors, both within and outside of the historical profession, which have encouraged the boom in memory studies. In addition, it traces the emerging historiography to examine both the creative diversity of the field as well as its common assumptions, insights, and strategic limits.     

Salt Production of Late Imperial China in the Upper Three Gorges Region: A Case Study of the Zhongjingba Site in Chongqing

This article aims to improve the understanding of salt production in the upper Three Gorges region, based on archaeological investigation and excavation of salt-production sites in Yushan, Pengshui County, Chongqing. This article introduces the features of salt sources and the types and dates of the salt wells in Yushan, and investigates the local brine transportation and salt-making techniques. The Zhongjingba site is a large salt-making site with well-preserved remains of production and support facilities dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. Large numbers of evaporation furnaces, brine tanks, and working pits have been excavated and revealed a complete process of producing salt. Analysis of historical documents and the excavated remnants has allowed the reconstruction of the po lu yin zao salt-making process (which, in Chinese, means to splash brine onto the evaporation furnace), the first archaeological evidence of this technique; the management, output capacity, and sales area of the ancient salt production in Yushan are also discussed.     

The curious case of Catherine Mary Hewitt and U.S. Major General of Volunteers John Fulton Reynolds: bodies,mourning the dead,and religion in the era of the American Civil War

ABSTRACT

At the time of his death at the Battle of Gettysburg, General Reynolds was the highest-ranking Union officer killed in the American Civil War. The return of the General’s body from the battlefront represented an uncommon feature of a war noted for its industrial scale and for the casualties it produced. How loved ones grieved Reynolds illustrates mourning practices among middle- to upper-class women in the Civil War North and underscores the centrality of death in nineteenth-century America. The death of Reynolds also occasioned the introduction of Reynolds’s sisters to the General’s secret fiancée, a Roman Catholic convert. Writers have attributed the clandestine nature of the engagement, and the General’s reluctance to introduce his fiancée to family, to Catherine Hewitt’s Roman Catholicism. But Catholics in the North received greater accommodation in mainline Protestant society than previously imagined, and the many kindnesses that the Reynolds family showed Hewitt point to an increasing acceptance of Catholics among Protestants in established social settings. Finally, Reynolds’s loved ones mourned him in religious and Victorian overtones, but it is not altogether clear that for them religion functioned as the predominant paradigm from which they elicited a transcendent meaning of the General’s death. In this local context, the responses of Reynolds’s loved ones to his death suggest the waning of religious belief in the era of the American Civil War.     

On the Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture of Paris

Geophysical survey has shed new light on the history of Cadbury Castle, a hillfort of presumed Iron Age date situated west of the Exe Valley in Devon. At least two prehistoric phases of development have been identified, as well as a previously unknown additional external line of defence which is tentatively suggested to date from the seventeenth-century Civil War. In addition, the finds from a nineteenth-century ‘excavation’ of a shaft or well in the interior are reviewed and found to represent a significant assemblage of late Roman date, possibly suggestive of the survival of pre-Christian practices.     

Commemorating a Rural African-American Family at a National Battlefield Park

The Robinson House site is situated within the Manassas National Battlefield Park in northern Virginia. The original Robinson House was constructed in the 1840s and was occupied until 1936 by the same free African-American family. The National Park Service recognizes and interprets the Robinson House since it was part of the Civil War battlefield landscape during the First and Second Battles of Manassas. The original house went through a series of structural additions and alterations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The house stood until 1993 when arsonists burned it, causing 60% damage to the structure. Today, the east chimney and the stone foundations remain. Amidst the many Civil War monuments at the battlefield park the interpretation of a century of occupation by the Robinson family through the remaining foundations adds meaning and depth to the area's local history. The Robinson House remains symbolize an African-American family's way of life as well as their struggle to survive during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. The foundations and site are a steadfast symbol of African-American cultural persistence that has prevailed for over 100 years on a battlefield landscape.     

‘The Charter of its Birthright’: The Civil War and American Nationalism

Abstract. This article examines the role of warfare in the development of American nationalism, focusing in particular on the American Civil War (1861–5). The American response to warfare, and especially to the two major conflicts that created and consolidated the American nation -the Revolution and the Civil War - is revealing in terms of how Americans went about the process of defining themselves as a nation. Evidence is offered here of how nineteenthcentury Americans used the American Revolution for both national and sectional definition; and how it in turn came to be supplanted by the Civil War as the positive act of American national construction. This article argues that the American response to the Civil War provides an opportunity for scholars to trace the development of the myths that are central to the construction of nationalism but that have, to date, only been examined in any depth in a European context. Specifically, it addresses the question of how and why a destructive, internecine Civil War is still regarded today as the ‘salvation drama’ of the American nation.     

Relies of reconciliation: the Confederate Museum and Civil War memory in the New South

This article examines the Confederate Memorial Literary Society (CMLS), an organization of elite white women in Richmond, Virginia who founded the Confederate Museum in the 1890s. Faced with the plunder of Civil War relics and cultural homogenization on northern terms, the CMLS founded the Confederate Museum to document and defend the Confederate cause and to uphold the antebellum mores that the New South's business ethos threatened to erode. In the end, however, the museum's version of the Lost Cause served the New South. By focusing on military sacrifice, the Confederate Museum aided the process of sectional reconciliation. By depicting slavery as benevolent, the museum's exhibits reinforced the notion that Jim Crow was a just and effective means of managing postwar southern society. Lastly, by glorifying the common soldier and portraying the South as "solid," the museum promoted obedience to the mandates of industrial capitalism. Thus, the Confederate Museum both critiqued and eased the economic transformations of the New South.     

Methods for calculating brine evaporation rates during salt production

Salt is recognized by archaeologists as an important commodity due to the biological need for sodium and other cultural uses. Numerous studies have described the various techniques used in converting brine to crystallized salt, but few, if any, have attempted to quantify the physical processes of evaporation in pre-industrial societies. Apart from the few areas where salt mining is possible, nearly all forms of salt production require evaporation of water to concentrate brine and ultimately produce salt crystals. This study quantifies three of the most common evaporation techniques and provides insight into the production rates of salt and fuel requirements. Methods of calculation are provided for determining evaporation through (1) direct solar heating of brine, (2) applied external heat to a vessel, and (3) an immersed heated object (e.g., stone). These results provide physical constraints on the evaporation process and provide investigators with techniques for estimating efficiency and total production of prehistoric and historic saltworks.     

Civil War heritage as American diplomacy, 1957–1965

This paper explores the role of Civil War heritage in U.S. public diplomacy during the Cold War era. Especially during the celebration of the Civil War’s centennial, between 1961 and 1965, the Americans endeavoured to harness the conflict’s heritage to promote U.S. interests in Europe. How they intended to do this is demonstrated primarily through an examination of Colonel Sidney Morgan’s mission to Europe to find how the commemoration of the Civil War could be used for public diplomacy. Additionally, by exploring how Civil War heritage was spread and used in the British public sphere, the paper examines and underlines the key role saved to unofficial cultural agents, such as Civil War re-enactment clubs and private people, in heritage diplomacy. The focus on unofficial agents and networks enable this study to show how heritage diplomacy works at the un-institutionalised level and to explore the interaction between the official and unofficial level in heritage diplomacy. The historical perspective and methodology cast new light on the use of history, historical memory and heritage for diplomatic ends and introduces both historians and heritage scholars with new avenues to explore, such as the role of memory and historical consciousness in shaping international relations.     

Review Article: The Perils of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Relations

JAMES J. BARNES and PATIENCE P. BARNES. Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries in London, 1844–67. Selinsgrove, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 1993. Pp. 475. $55.00 (US)

IAN F. W. BECKETT. The War Correspondents: The American Civil War. Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1993. Pp. 198. £17.99

ROBERT M. BROWNING, JR. From Cape Charles to Cape Fear: The North Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Pp. xi, 453. $44-95 (US)

GEORGE E. BUKER. Blockaders, Refugees, and Contrabands: Civil War on Florida's Gulf Coast, 1861–1865. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Pp. ix, 235. $29-95 (US)

HOWARD JONES. Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992; Pp. xiii, 300. $50.95 (US).     

“Charcoal scribblings of the most rascally character”: conflict,identity, and testimony in American Civil War graffiti

Civil War soldiers’ graffiti survive at more than 60 sites, predominantly in Virginia, including churches, court houses, caves, and houses. Although often terse and fragmentary, they provide an intriguing insight into soldiers’ experiences. This essay offers a tentative framework for analyzing how the graffiti functioned: as informal commemoration of wartime experiences; as a social activity, displaying the loyalties, frustrations, and humor of army life; and as an invasive act, vandalizing southern property.     

Colonowhen, Colonowho, Colonowhere, Colonowhy: Exploring the Meaning behind the Use of Colonoware Ceramics in Nineteenth-Century Manassas, Virginia

This paper explores the meaning and use of colonoware ceramics recovered from six archaeological sites dating from the nineteenth-century at Manassas, Virginia. Americans, both free and enslaved, occupied this landscape. Archaeological investigations have recovered colonoware at some nineteenth-century domestic sites but not others. The occurrence of colonoware at these sites is patterned: colonoware in nineteenth-century Manassas was not an “ethnic” marker denoting peoples of African descent, but rather a social marker that distinguished enslaved people from free. People of free and enslaved status attributed negative connotations to colonoware. Enslaved servants employed colonoware out of economic necessity, not as a way to express ethnicity.     

Patriot Graves: American national identity and the Civil War dead

The Civil War was America’s defining conflict, the war that made the nation and the fulcrum for the development of American national identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the role that the Civil War dead played in this process has only begun to be explored. Although the monuments raised to honor the dead, along with the battlefields on which they fought, attract considerable interest, the cemeteries constructed to inter them have been integrated into the landscape – literal and figurative – of the American nation so fully that the need they answered, the manner of their development, the form they took, and their longer‐term symbolic message has been relatively neglected. Yet the Civil War dead were a crucial – indeed, the crucial – component in the construction of American national identity. Although scholars interpret American attitudes toward the Civil War dead within the context of the mourning rituals of the antebellum era, the war required, and produced, a different approach to death, for which antebellum precedent had ill‐prepared Americans. Removed from its antebellum religious and societal framework, death in the Civil War acquired a new and more potent national meaning that not only validated American nationalism through warfare, but anticipated the response to fallen soldiers in future European conflicts.     

Haciendas and economic change in Yucatán: Entrepreneurial strategies in the Parroquia de Yaxcabá, 1775–1850

Using archaeological and historical data from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century haciendas in theParroquia de Yaxcabá, Yucatán, this paper demonstrates how documentary records can be employed to create diachronic archaeological explanations. Both the organization of production on the hacienda and the entrepreneurial strategies pursued by the estate owners. contribute to the form of the hacienda. The following analysis suggests quantitative and qualitative explanations for variation in hacienda size and architectural elaboration. The archaeological interpretations offer a reconsideration of processes of economic change in central Yucatán prior to the Caste War of 1847.     

Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting,or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?

The Civil War generated hundreds of history paintings. Yet, as this essay argues, painters failed to create any iconic, lasting images of the Civil War using the conventions of grand manner history painting, despite the expectations of many that they would and should. This essay first examines the terms by which I am evaluating this failure, then moves on to a consideration of the American history painting tradition. I next examine several history paintings of Civil War scenes in light of this tradition and argue that their "failure" to capture the meaning and essence of the war resulted from a breakdown of the narrative conventions of history painting. Finally, I glance briefly at Winslow Homer's Civil War scenes, arguably the only ones which have become canonical, and suggest that the success of these images comes from their abandonment of old conventions and the invention of new ones.     

From abolitionists to fundamentalists: the transformation of the Wesleyan Methodists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This article analyzes the cultural trajectory of a small, but influential denomination that formed in 1843. Wesleyan Methodism first emerged as an abolitionist protest against the Methodist compromise with slavery. The new church drew in members who championed a range of antebellum social reforms, including abolitionism, pacifism, women's rights, and temperance. By the early twentieth century, Wesleyans would become closely identified with fundamentalism, waging war against modernism, championing personal holiness, and maintaining a militant brand of protestant orthodoxy. This article places Wesleyans within a larger religious and cultural context of the Civil War era and the late nineteenth-century disenchantment of the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras. It also traces the reasons for the Wesleyans shifting focus away from social reform and toward matters of personal holiness.     

Coming to Terms with Violence: Sacrifice,collective memory and reconciliation in inter-war Finland

This article connects notions of collective memory to the notion of cultural memory. Special interest is given to the role of national myths and other cultural reservoirs in organizing Finnish collective memories during the period from the Civil War of 1918 until the beginning of the Second World War. First the author seeks to uncover the ways both sides of the conflict utilized cultural reservoirs in their memory cultures. Then the author looks into ways in which the Social Democrats especially tried in the late 1930s to transform divisive and even traumatic experiences resulting from the Civil War into socially productive narratives. The transformation of the memory of the internal and reciprocal violence into unifying self-sacrifices proved to be the most crucial act in Finnish memory culture during the first half of the 20th century. This interpretation dates the first acts of public reconciliation to the late 1930s, or the time before the Winter War.     

Civil War Iron and the H.L. Hunley Iron Ballast

At the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861, the Union greatly outpaced the Confederacy in industrial manufacturing capabilities. The Confederacy's economy prior to the conflict was largely based on agriculture, and the Southern states lacked the facilities and skilled labourers to produce iron on the scale necessary to compete with the Union. The possibility of importing products was greatly diminished when President Lincoln instituted a naval blockade around major Southern ports, limiting the amount of cargo that could be imported from Europe. Consequently, the Confederacy was forced to adapt ironworks to wartime purposes. Despite these adaptations, the Confederacy suffered from iron shortages throughout the war. This paper uses the iron ballast found on the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley as a case study for the manufacturing processes, labour relationships and social significance of iron production and usage in the Confederacy.     

Excavations on a Roman Salt-working Site at Jersey Way,Middlewich, Cheshire

In 2012, Oxford Archaeology North undertook large-scale archaeological excavations at Jersey Way, Middlewich, Cheshire, in advance of development by Stewart Milne Homes Ltd. Historically, Middlewich is well-known for its intimate connection with the salt-production industry. The excavation uncovered a sizable area of Roman remains, some of which were extremely well-preserved as a result of waterlogging, comprising timber used for processes connected with Roman salt production. One of these features, a brine well, contained evidence for ‘placed’ or ‘structured’ deposition. Other archaeological and palaeoenvironmental evidence was also connected with salt production, in addition to the infrastructure of the Roman settlement and agricultural activity. Together, this allows greater insights into Middlewich’s Roman settlement, the salt-working sites of Cheshire and, more generally, the process and form of inland salt production.     

Detecting feigned illness during the American Civil War

The problem of feigned illness was a common one in the Civil War, afflicting both Northern and Southern military forces. The diagnostic approach of the Civil War doctor involved the initial dichotomous classification of each patient; he either suffered from physical illness (what today would be called an organic illness) or he purposely devised symptoms to avoid military service. The modern concept of the unconscious mind was totally absent from the diagnostic thinking of the Civil War physician.