War Matters

As recent controversies surrounding Confederate icons have made clear, many Americans plug themselves into the past through objects. By interacting with a firearm, a flag, a painting, a book, or a statue, people believe they can reach back and “touch” the characters and events that infuse Americanness with meaning. For various reasons, professional historians are often ill equipped and/or unwilling to engage with nonacademics on these colloquial terms. Therefore, Joan E. Cashin's War Matters comes along at a propitious moment. On one level, it debuts innovative ways of understanding the Civil War era through the exploration of objects. On another, the book has a unique chance to help bridge the aforementioned communicative divide—that is, to employ the accessibility of object-driven history for charting common ground between scholars and the public. The cast of War Matters features a stellar mix of rising and eminent scholars. Across the board, prose quality is excellent. Some of the essays are genuinely revelatory. Jason Phillips's interpretation of the bowie knife as it weaves through the bloody saga of John Brown underscores wonderfully the connection between objects and self-perceptions of righteousness, honor, and masculinity as the sectional crisis unfolded. Peter S. Carmichael's account of men employing objects of remembrance to cope with the horrible results of the conflict in 1865 illuminates an important counternarrative to the idea that soldiers wished to excise all the traumas and ugliness of war from memory. And Yael A. Sternhell's retelling of the flight, capture, and later years of Jefferson Davis—with emphasis on how the ex-Confederate president fought to reclaim the artifacts of his own life—unmasks how the Civil War generation understood the value of material items for constructing, curating, and managing their legacies in real time

Aesthetics · Art · Honor · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Masculinity · Meaning (existential · Media studies · Memorialization · Object (grammar · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Psychology

• To Hold Time and Place Together”

  Vanessa Steinroetter•Women s Studies•2020

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