The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture. By Allison M. Johnson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2019. ix, 208 pp. Cloth, $45.00; e-book available.
Scholarship on the Civil War tends to either overemphasize canonical authors or stress the significance of “abstraction, disembodiment, reconciliation, and silence.” Taking a different tack, Johnson focuses on the war-forged human forms that memorialized and mediated internecine trauma in the vernacular discourse of periodicals, visual illustrations, diaries, and correspondences. Evidencing the “corporeal consequences” of mass violence for US political, social, and cultural identity, Johnson sorts these “disruptive bodies” into case study–based chapters that consider female personifications of the cause, “battle-tested African American soldiers,” amputee veterans, and women (metaphorically) wounded on the home front.
Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War. By James A. Davis. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. 2019. xxvi, 358 pp. Cloth,...
