Marquette Bookshelf: Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America
Co-edited by Dr. James Marten, professor of history in Marquette University’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences
In Buying and Selling Civil War Memory, Dr. James Marten, professor of history, and his co-editor worked with other contributors to explore the ways in which Gilded Age manufacturers, advertisers, publishers, and others commercialized Civil War memory. Advertisers used images of the war to sell everything from cigarettes to sewing machines; an entire industry grew up around uniforms made for veterans rather than soldiers; publishing houses built subscription bases by tapping into wartime loyalties; while old and young alike found endless sources of entertainment that harkened back to the war.
Dr. Marten answered some questions about his new book, including his favorite part of the process and what he hopes to accomplish with this books publication.
What was your favorite part of the writing/editing process?
It was really fun to develop and finish a project with a good friend; historians don’t normally collaborate with others — our profession is famously individualistic — so this was a great change of pace.
But I also like working with authors. I’ve done a lot of editing, including working as editor of the Journal of the History or Childhood and Youth for five years, and it’s very rewarding working with other historians to tighten and sharpen their work, especially if they’re fairly new to the business. Although Buying and Selling includes work by several very senior historians, several authors are just starting their careers. In some ways, an editing project like this is an extension of my work with graduate students at Marquette.
How would you describe the book in one sentence?
Buying and Selling shows the ways in which the memory of the Civil War — its meanings, its results, its impact on individuals, families, and communities — appeared in all kinds of products, entertainments, and publications that Americans consumed in their everyday lives.
Where did the idea for this book come from?
My co-editor, Caroline E. Janney (who holds an endowed chair at the University of Virginia), and I have both published books and articles on memory and the Civil War era. We talked about doing a project together for two or three years before settling on editing an anthology. The essays we wrote for the volume came out of our previous research. Carrie wrote a great piece about the Atlanta Cyclorama, a massive, circular painting of the 1864 Battle of Atlanta that was one of many large-scale battle paintings that were popular late in the nineteenth century. In fact, many were painted by German immigrant artists in Milwaukee. My essay on professional lecturers who traveled the country speaking on Civil War topics grew out of my biography of one of the best-known lecturers, Corporal James Tanner, who had lost the lower parts of both legs as an eighteen-year-old soldier, but became a famous advocate for veterans and popular speaker.
We both thought there was much more to explore in this intersection of commerce, history, and memory, and so put out a call for proposals. We received about twenty-five or twenty-seven ideas and selected the fifteen that covered the most diverse set of topics in the most interesting ways. They range from trading cards featuring Civil War generals sold with cigarettes to uniforms marketed to Confederate veterans; from images of the ironclad ships the “Monitor” and the “Merrimack” in ads for dozens of different products to the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, which was disassembled and rebuilt as a museum in Chicago in the 1890s; from stereoscopic (3-D) images of army camps and the aftermaths of battles to selling “cures” to veterans addicted to pain killers; and from series books for young adults about youthful heroes of the Civil War to a tiny toy “panorama” created by the Milton Bradley company as the war ended.
Is this your first book? What is your publishing history?
I’ve been a historian for thirty-five years and have published over twenty book-length projects during that time. Several are single-authored monographs, while others are edited versions of primary documents and a number of them are anthologies like this one, with original essays written by a collection of junior and senior scholars. My research fields are the Civil War era — primarily the experiences of children and veterans — and the history of childhood.
What do you hope to accomplish with this book?
Much of the writing on Civil War memory revolves around the politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly as it related to the Lost Cause (which we’ve heard so much about lately as Confederate monuments have been protested and taken down around the South). Carrie [co-editor Caroline E. Janney] and I wanted to get beyond this more traditional approach to memory (in fact, until the very end I was still calling the book “Beyond Memory”), to examine how the Civil War remained an important part of popular culture and everyday life for decades after it was over.
Book Details
- Publisher : University of Georgia Press (July 15, 2021)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 286 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0820359653
- ISBN-13 : 978–0820359656
