The War Went On

Reviewed by: The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans ed. by Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera Kevin Adams (bio) The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans. Edited by Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 344. Cloth, $55.00.) The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans reflects a postsesquicentennial moment in which the field is pursuing new directions guided by a new generation of historians. No matter how one defines the canonical Civil War, there is little doubt that scholarship on the war is moving in geographical, chronological, and thematic directions that would have seemed incredible a generation ago. Though not without some drawbacks, this edited volume, featuring more than a dozen contributions from midcareer and junior scholars, productively explores each of these new directions and demonstrates that the shadow of the war was long indeed. In introducing The War Went On, editors Brian Jordan and Evan Rothera explicate in a careful and concise manner the themes that structure [End Page 302] the collection. As the introduction makes clear, this is not a slapdash volume, held together only by the force of a special academic conference or friendships of long standing, but one that seeks to engage established lines of inquiry into veterans’ postwar experiences. As such, graduate students will especially benefit from reading The War Went On, for it presents an interesting collective portrait into the variety of approaches early twenty-first-century Civil War historians are using in their attempts to understand veterans’ varied postwar lives. At the same time, it might be more difficult for undergraduates to absorb both the book’s larger purpose and the significance of the individual pieces. For example, one of Jordan and Rothera’s historiographical targets in the introduction is the hibernation thesis advanced in Gerald Linderman’s Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (1987). Referencing Linderman will help those toiling in the scholarly fields of the Civil War situate what follows, but I am not entirely sure that such an explanation will work for readers new to the field. A more expansive introduction that explains for an undergraduate audience how the individual pieces have the potential to reshape our understanding of the Civil War’s legacy might increase the classroom utility of The War Went On. Furthermore, to this reviewer’s perhaps idiosyncratic way of thinking, the fifteen essays that constitute this edited collection may be a few too many. This is not an indictment of any single essay; it should, in fact, be emphasized that each piece in The War Went On aligns with the overall thrust of the collection. Be that as it may, a handful of essays would have benefited from their authors having had more space to develop their research or thinking. That is to say, crucial elements in the useful pieces submitted by Rebecca Howard, Steven Sodergren, and Kelly Mezurek (i.e., the social, cultural, and political context of life in postwar Arkansas; the discussion of “truth” in historical narratives as studied by scholars such as Eileen Chang; the necessity of foregrounding Black voices in the study of Black soldiers) are more hinted at than developed at times. No matter the limitations imposed by word count, a few essays merit special mention for their keen analysis and surprising findings. Sarah Handley-Cousins’s “Speaking for Themselves: Disabled Veterans and Civil War Medical Photography” not only provides readers with a sensitive meditation on the complexities of photographic representation, but it also suggests with some force that historians have treated photographs of grievously wounded Union soldiers as “voyeuristic shortcuts” that bypass the perspectives of the wounded themselves. To conclude that the gaze of the medical photographer exposes “honest artifacts of the war” is to miss [End Page 303] how much that gaze conceals (114). Kurt Hackemer’s “Civil War Veteran Colonies on the Western Frontier,” meanwhile, is noteworthy for both the locale and Hackemer’s methodological finesse. By treating service in the three hundred hardest-fighting regiments documented by William Fox in his 1889 tome, Regimental Losses in the American Civil

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