Haunted by the Civil War - Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-C...

Haunted by the Civil War: Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-Century United States



https://WebToolTip.com

English | 2025 | ISBN: 0691248575 | True PDF | 232 pages | 8.82 MB

How the legacy of the Civil War—as presented by writers, poets, and artists of the time—has shaped American visions of democracy

In Haunted by the Civil War, Shirley Samuels explores the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others to investigate the long cultural shadow of America’s cataclysmic sundering. Juxtaposing these texts with images—ranging from paintings by Winslow Homer to newspaper and magazine illustrations of political controversies—Samuels argues that the Civil War still haunts our attitudes toward democracy. The recent toppling of Confederate monuments, the continuing protests over racial and sexual discrimination, immigration, and Indigenous land rights: each of these forms part of the war’s legacy.